As we close out the year, I wanted to pass along an incredible update that I believe speaks to God’s graciousness in developing Empowering Action individually and collectively as an organization, epitomized in these photos of Esperanza Ramirez and a group of Dominican Abundant Life Program participants on a mission trip to Cuba this past year.
For context, Esperanza joined the Empowering Action staff in June 2017. However, her involvement with EA began years earlier, when she was an early participant in the Abundant Life Program. Over the years, she has grown from a ministry recipient at her own church in Santo Domingo to facilitating a church-based, poverty-alleviation program that impacts thousands of lives each month in Cuba and Haiti, as well as her home country.
But the story does not end there.
The vision of the Abundant Life Program is to motivate and equip the local church for greater biblically sound, Christ-honoring ministry within its own mission field. Transformed and inspired after completing the program and experiencing fruitful local implementation, in April, one church organized and funded a mission trip to the neighboring island of Cuba to serve alongside the local church amid the nation’s ongoing struggles. Now, next March, EA will host the first mission trip of Cuban church members to the Dominican Republic to serve alongside their brothers and sisters in Christ.
These developments embody God’s grace as Empowering Action’s mission comes to fruition, in equipping the global church for greater biblical fidelity and ministry effectiveness.
This is the realization of Empowering Action’s vision of transforming communities through the faithful ministry of the local church.
This is the global Church, transformed by the power of the Gospel (Rom. 12:2), equipped “for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up,” eager to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).
And these are “the good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Eph. 2:10) as an EA family.