Digital Missionaries in Nicaragua 
Jhony is a pastor and church planter with Multiplication Network Ministries (MNM). He also works as the Church Planting Database Coordinator for the Church of God of Prophecy in Nicaragua.
The Church in Nicaragua was challenged as a result of the socio-political instability of 2018 because it drastically affected the daily work of the churches. “As if that were not enough,” Jhony shares, “We were challenged again in 2020 with the pandemic that forced us to keep our distance and avoid meeting together.”
Jhony and others in his faith community began to wonder how they could continue to share the gospel in this context. When the regional coordinator of the church planting department and MNM’s Regional Coordinator of Central America announced a strategy called Digital Missionaries, Jhony saw it as an answer to their prayer. With his wife Lissett, they started the process after receiving resources, training, and support. They analyzed their social networks to contact people and start their digital community, which they named “Surviving Together.”
“We started our group with 5 people, meeting with them once a week and we quickly saw the hand of God,” Jhony shares. They were encouraged when Karen, a young Nicaraguan who was living in Spain, joined them virtually.
“I was in a difficult time, because my father had passed away due to COVID-19,” Karen shares. “Someone told me about a group called Surviving Together. A few days later I joined a meeting and God has blessed me through connecting digitally with people who were there when I needed them most.”
In addition to Karen, Jhony reports that 14 more people joined the group. He is focusing on developing eight of them as potential leaders to multiply their impact. He has been thrilled by the potential of what digital ministry can do. He feels that, though the time of the pandemic is challenging, it is also a time of great hope. For a long time, the church had resisted breaking into the digital communication strategies that today it is now so focused on. Jhony is convinced that God is making it possible.
There are great expectations for this new strategy of ministry - “The human being since its creation in Eden has been a sociable being,” Jhony says. The reality of today is that technology facilitates and greatly allows the church to develop its ability to gather groups of people together, even when located in different places or countries around the world. What was established in communities at the face-to-face level is now capable of being accomplished through digital means.
Jhony prays God will lead them to people who have been touched by the Holy Spirit and are open to receiving the gospel. He knows God is already working because he has already seen how helpful digital tools can be as they have allowed the church to serve people in small groups and helped church planters to be even more intentional in reaching the lost. These tools are also powerful for strengthening believers in their faith and mentoring them in their walk with God. Jhony firmly believes that church leaders are equipped with what is needed to bring this dream to reality and that when put to work, “anything is possible.”
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching. (Hebrews 10:24-25, NIV)
