Colombia: The Churches

We worked at three churches down in Bogota: El Paraiso, Los Alpes, and Luciera. Each church was named after the barrio in which it was located.


El Paraiso
El Paraiso was our home base both this time and two years ago. We lived in its upper rooms all week, and we had more services there than at the other two churches. El Paraiso is at Bogota’s second lowest poverty level. The main room on the ground floor was nicer than most other structures in the area. It had a red tile floor, blue walls and structural pillars, and a bas relief painting sort of thing behind the stage area. It could seat over 100 in plastic lawn chairs and was approximately the size of NHCC’s fellowship hall. Upstairs was a kitchen area connected to a sitting area, two rooms with beds for us (one for guys and one for girls), a storage room, a room we used as VBS headquarters, an office, and two bathrooms with showers. Aside from the main meeting area on the first floor, the rooms were walled and floored in concrete and roofed with corrugated metal and fiberglass panels. The interior was painted bright colors.

Los Alpes
For both trips, Los Alpes has been our secondary church. They no longer have their own Sunday service, but they get bussed down to El Paraiso on Sunday mornings for a larger service. This was where the women’s group met while the men met at El Paraiso. The neighborhood of Los Alpes is at Bogota’s lowest level of poverty, and it’s easy to tell. While the Los Alpes church is smaller and not quite as nice as El Paraiso, it’s still nice compared to the surrounding structures with its well-made brick walls and a tiled meeting room. It’s one of the few two-story structures in the area. Upstairs is an office, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two rooms for general purposes.

Luciera
I’m not at all confident that I’ve gotten the exact name of this church/barrio. This church was established within the past two years in an area two affluence levels above El Paraiso. Compared to what we were used to in Bogota, it was a pretty nice area. We were only at Luciera for a Sunday morning service, one day of VBS, and an evening service, but with its much smaller congregation we were able to get to know people a little better. There were some adults there who were learning English, so we got to help them with that while they helped us with our Spanish. The building we were in had two levels, but the upper level had private apartments. The church “building” itself had a small meeting room, a craft/sewing room, a classroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen area.