Extract from Foreword:

"Juan Carlos Ortiz.  What a man and what a writer!  The following pages will introduce you to one of God's most beautiful and humble servants in Latin America today.  Juan Carlos Ortiz is real; he pulls no punches.  He writes like he talks and talks like he writes.  And what he writes is not stuffy theory based on a few things he has taken from dusty books in a Buenos Aires library.  On the contrary.  His message of encouragement to the Church is central in the wide-ranging set of experiences of a concerned pastor in the Argentine capital."

Introduction:

"When I came to the church in Buenos Aires, it had 184 members.  We got to work right away, and after two years of vigorous organising and outreach, we were up to around 600.  We had tripled.

Our follow-up system was one of the best.  We had form letters number one, two , three, and four for every category - males, females, children, Jews, Arabs, anyone you could imagine.  We had records of each telephone call and visit; we were pushing subscriptions to helpful magazines.  The cards showed exactly how each person was doing, whether he had been baptized, everything.

The denommination was so impressed that I was invited to be a main speaker at two different convetions to share my follow-up system and distribute samples of all our forms to the pastors.

Yet underneath it all, I sensed that something wasn't right.  Things seemed to stay high so long as I worked sixteen hours a day.  But when I relaxed, everything came down.  That disturbed me.

Finally, I decided to stop.  I told my board, "I must go away for two weeks to pray".  I headed for the countryside and gave myself to meditation and prayer.

The Holy Spirit began to break me down.  The first thing He said was, "You are promoting the gospel the same way Coca-Cola sells Coke, the same way Reader's Digest sells books and magazines.  You are using all the human tricks you learned in school.  But where is My finger in all of this?"

I didn't know what to say.

Then then Lord told me a second thing, "You are not growing," He said.  "you think you are, because you've gone from 200 69 600.  But you're not growing - you're just getting fat.." 

What did that mean?"

Fascinating book - a must read for young aspiring leaders, watch out for the traps that can steal away the joy of your calling!!!!