It was February 9, 2009, a sad day in my life. I was leaving Venezuela. My colleague Rebecca Rodríguez and I were the last international workers (IWs) to leave the Venezuelan Alliance ministry, where I had served for twenty-seven years. I was also sad because of some disappointments in ministry. One, in particular, was regarding a young couple I worked with in the first Alliance church that started in Caracas in 1986.
When I moved from Alliance ministry in Valencia, Venezuela, to the capital city of Caracas, it was to help Harold and Becky Priebe in this new church plant. The young couple I met there, Pablo and Carolina, were recruited to help me with youth ministry; their involvement was valued. Pablo was the youngest son of an Alliance Peruvian family instrumental in the start of the church in Caracas. After Pablo and Carolina married and started a family, their involvement in the church ended, even though they attended sporadically. I sadly gave up on them ever being deeply involved in the church again. When I left in 2009, I wondered what would become of this young family. I questioned if the time we had poured into them in those early years would bear fruit once again. I was to find out a few years later.
The story continues…
My background…my heritage
“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect...” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
It was the Fall of 1969 and my first year of Bible college in Miami, Florida. I was sitting dejectedly in the welcome chapel service while listening to several new students give their testimonies.
My goal in life was to become a missionary, a goal I had since I was eleven years old. I had dedicated my life to the Lord at a missions week at an Alliance church in Burnaby, British Columbia. Coming from a missionary family, we had been instructed in God’s Word through family devotions. We prayed for missionaries, friends of my parents from Bible college who, like us, had spread all over the world. In our early teen years, my dad had purchased youth devotional books so we could start doing our own personal devotions. We had faithfully attended Bible-believing, missions-minded churches. My home life was happy, and I was doing well. Entering into Bible college after high school was the next step on my road to the mission field.
So why was I feeling so dejected as I listened to the testimonies? Though I thanked God for rescuing and saving these new friends and bringing them to Bible college, all I could think was, Wow, I don’t have an impressive personal testimony like them…mine is boring…saved at the age of five and a half, dedicated my life to the Lord at age eleven, daughter of missionaries… In my imagination, people were yawning with boredom at my testimony. A few days, I felt down about this until the Lord broke through my wrong thinking and I repented. I began to thank Him; He had saved me from so many sad and painful events by saving me at such a young age. This had been God’s sovereign plan for my life. I had a rich and blessed heritage and legacy for which to be thankful. God met me during this spiritual crisis, but it would not be the last time I faced this issue; it would show up again in my career as an international worker.
Cuba Then…and My Youth
This is the story of my heritage. My parents, Bert and Lena Warden, met at Western Canadian Bible Institute in Regina right after World War II. After getting married in 1948, their deep love for children led them into a couple of years of ministry with children’s organizations in Canada before heading to Cuba to work at an orphanage with Mission to Orphans (later merged with Worldteam). I was born in Cuba on January 1, 1951, the second child born to them, following my older brother, Len. My twin sisters, Judy and Joy, were born a year and a half later.
Unfortunately, both parents became ill after the twins were born, requiring us to return to Canada for a few years, living in Three Hills, Alberta, where my parents served as home representatives for Mission to Orphans. In 1956 we returned to Cuba with another brother named Evan.
Living in Cuba, we went through the Castro Revolution ending in January 1959. Those were frightening days as the orphanage was located near the city of Santa Clara, where the final, decisive battle was fought. We often heard the air raid sirens as Dictator Batista’s airplanes circled over the orphanage to bomb and strafe in Santa Clara.
But our life in Cuba was soon to come to an end; the orphanage was not allowed to continue operation because of the Communist regime under Fidel Castro. Therefore, all the Canadian missionaries who worked at the orphanage, except one couple, left Cuba. We went in the summer of 1961 as a family of eight; my sister Lori was born there before leaving.
Though we returned to British Columbia, my parents desired to return to the Caribbean with Worldteam. However, with another daughter, Bonnie, born in Canada, we were now a family of nine; raising support was a significant challenge.
Another part of my legacy was established by my parents during the two years we lived in Canada. The week-long missions conferences at the Alliance church we attended in Burnaby were considered important events. Our whole family attended every night of the conference. During one of these weeks, I heard Alliance missionary Garth Hunt speak of his ministry in Vietnam, and I dedicated my life to the Lord to be a missionary when I grew up. My other siblings were also impacted for serving the Lord during missions weeks at this and other Alliance churches over the years.
When it became evident we were not going to be able to return to the Caribbean, God opened up a different opportunity for my parents. There was a massive influx of Cuban refugees to Miami in the early 1960s. The five English-speaking Alliance churches in Miami, and a church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, wanted to reach them for Christ and were willing to support an Alliance worker to do this. The Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) in New York contacted Worldteam. They asked if they had any missionaries available to move to Miami and begin a Spanish-speaking Alliance church. This was how our family of nine ended up in Florida; my parents lived there for the next twenty years. They were involved in both church planting and Spanish Christian literature ministry. My parents started the first Spanish Alliance Church, and after three years, turned it over to a pastor who had come to Miami from Cuba. My dad continued in the literature ministry until moving back to Canada in 1982.
We helped our parents with the Spanish church ministry during those years in Miami, but they felt it was important for us to be involved in an English-speaking Alliance church as the older four of us children were entering our teen years. Once again, we were engaged in a missions-minded church with a great youth ministry. My parents did many things right but were not perfect parents (nor were we perfect children). Whatever “success” they had as parents was attributed to the grace of God. They also said they were grateful for godly pastors, Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and Bible college professors who had a lasting impact on our lives as youth. While reading through the Epistle to the Romans during my teen years, I came to understand what it meant to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Another thing standing out clearly in the memories of my parents and my home life came to me years later. My parents believed Matthew 6:33, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness…” and they fleshed it out in front of us. What they lived outside our home was no different than what they lived in the home, even though not perfectly. They were firm believers in prayer, and all of us children were covered by their prayers during their whole lifetime. After the grandchildren started arriving, prayers were raised to God for them as well. My parents never pressured us to become missionaries or enter full-time Christian work.
Though I was the first to head overseas, I was soon followed by some of my siblings into Alliance ministries in South America. Len and Diane Warden went to Brazil, where they served for thirty-four years. Judy Warden was a teacher at the Alliance Academy in Quito, Ecuador, for twenty-two years. Joy (Warden) and Bob Brougher served the Alliance in three countries, seventeen years in Bogota, Colombia, four years in Caracas, Venezuela, and ten years in Asuncion, Paraguay.
Serving in North America, Evan and Betty Warden went in Bible camp ministries, at the Alliance camp in Eagle Bay, British Columbia for fifteen years, at Stillwood Camp for two years, and then Bear Lake Bible Camp in Alberta for seven years. Lori (Warden) and Gary Schmidt were Alliance tentmakers in Caracas for three and a half years. They then worked in Alliance pastoral ministries in Miami, Florida and Tsawwassen, British Columbia, before Gary embarked on teaching at Simpson Bible College in Redding, California and, most recently, at Trinity University in Langley, British Columbia. Bonnie (Warden) and Dean Salvog have served as lay leaders in Alliance churches in Miami and Keystone Heights, Florida, in youth and worship ministries. Three of my parent’s grandchildren and their spouses are currently international workers, one family with the Alliance in Amman, Jordan.
Venezuela Then…
When I finished Bible college in 1973, I decided to serve with a camp ministry in need of a single woman working with a missionary family in Venezuela. I served one term with them from 1976 to 1980. I had attended Alliance summer camps in Miami throughout my youth, and they had left a profound impact. I wanted to have a similar effect on the lives of youth. It was a stretching time of ministry. The family I served with my first year had to leave to raise more support and then decided not to return to Venezuela. So, I served alone for about a year and a half. When another family joined me, we worked well together until we realized our philosophy of ministry was not the same. I realized the Lord had given me the spiritual gifts of exhortation and teaching. One of the breaking points was not being allowed to have any teaching role if our camp training classes included men. So, I left this organization on good terms.
My desire was to return to Venezuela and work in church planting, which is how I ended up contacting the C&MA in the USA. I had always considered myself “Alliance” as our family had been in Alliance churches in Canada and Miami. So it felt like coming home when I was accepted as an Alliance missionary in 1981, after a semester of studies in The Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, New York, in 1980.
For twenty-seven years (1982 to 2009), I ministered in Venezuela with the Alliance. Most of those years were in church planting in Valencia and Caracas, but the last few years, I was involved as a professor in our modular Bible institute, travelling between three cities where we had Alliance churches, training leaders and pastors. When I arrived in Valencia, Venezuela, there was only one Alliance church. However, by the time I transferred to the ministry in Caracas in 1988, there were four Alliance churches in Valencia.
Another ministry evolving in Venezuela was in the area of music. Little did I know, years of piano lessons started as a child in Cuba, and singing in a trio with my twin sisters from early adolescence, would be incorporated into my ministry.
In church planting overseas, I learned one must be willing to be stretched, especially in the first stages of starting a church. Although one may have a spiritual gift or a passion for particular ministries, one must be willing to help out wherever needed until nationals are trained to do those ministries, like in children’s, youth, and worship ministries. This was true for me. Not only did I help by accompanying on the keyboard, but I also had to lead the worship team while playing the keyboard at times. Then I decided I would introduce Christmas cantatas in the churches. I translated several cantatas over the years and incorporated people from the Alliance churches in the choirs, using CD orchestration accompaniment for each cantata. These were very popular in our churches. My early training in music, and fluency in Spanish, were another part of my legacy.
As I look back on my years in the first Alliance church in Caracas (1988 to 1998), I can see God’s hand in preparing me for future ministry and preparing Venezuelans for future ministry. My colleague, Rebecca, and I had a ministry to single women in the church. Many women were alone, single (never married), single with children, divorced and/or widowed. We provided fellowship and teaching to this group. Many of the women later became leaders in the church in various areas of ministry. One woman returned to her native Colombia and served the Lord in an Alliance church in Bogota in children’s ministries. This passion had been ignited in her because of the training she received in our church in Caracas.
Little did I realize the Lord had a major shake-up for the Alliance international workers and the Venezuela Alliance National Church. Not only was the political scene changing in the country with the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999, but the Alliance church scene was stagnating in their church planting. Though the National Church had tried to do their own church planting, most of those attempts had failed. Of the ten churches that existed, the Alliance missionaries had started all but about two. The Bible Institute was also mostly run and supported by the Alliance mission. It was time to “cut the apron strings.” Though it was not an easy decision, God was in it; He was still in control. 1
Venezuela now…
The Venezuela Alliance stepped up to the plate and continued moving forward. Since 2009, there are sixteen churches, six of which are new church plants. Two Alliance churches are being led by non-Venezuelans, though they are the fruit of the Alliance ministries in Peru and Chile. These two churches have been in Venezuela for about fifteen to nineteen years. The other fourteen churches and church plants are pastored by Venezuelans, most of whom were trained in the Venezuelan Bible Institute. Unfortunately, Venezuela’s current political and economic chaos has placed a hardship on the churches and the pastors. Over the six mentioned, some new church plants could not continue operation because of lack of economy to support them.
The Bible Institute (IBAVEN) has continued with the help of Venezuelan Alliance pastors and visiting Peruvian professors. In recent years, the Alliance Seminary in Peru has played an essential role in Venezuela. Professors from Peru started travelling to Venezuela in 2014 to lead classes every three months, but during the pandemic in 2020-2021, they have been giving online courses to 55 students. There are currently 72 students registered in the Bible Institute.
What of Pablo and Carolina, the couple who had been active in the early years in Caracas? God got ahold of them and their three teenage sons, all of them became actively involved in the church again in 2010. Pablo and Carolina were helping with ministry to couples in the church, and their boys were involved in youth ministries. In fact, by 2017, Pablo was taken on staff as one of the pastors of that first Alliance church in Caracas, and Carolina became involved in the Women’s Encounter with God ministry of the church. Though I had given up on them, God had not. The spiritual growth in Pablo has been evidenced, especially in April 2021. Within one day of each other, he suffered his mother and his wife’s passing during the Covid pandemic. He has continued his pastoral ministry and has shared a couple of devotional reflections on the Internet about suffering and comfort from the Lord, showing the amazing insight and strength God has given him.
Thinking about leaving Venezuela in 2009 was not in my life plan. I had expected I would be retiring from ministry there. But, again, I struggled with the Lord’s plan for my life, as well as for the lives of my fellow international workers. What was in store for me? What kind of ministry could I be involved in somewhere else? I was already in my late fifties and not really looking to go to a country where I would have to learn a new language. What was God up to?
Cuba now…
What He was up to was bringing me full circle in my life. The Lord was going to send me back to Cuba, the land of my birth, to become involved in the Alliance ministry. However, since I was born in Cuba and wanted to enter the country, I needed to take out a Cuban passport to travel in and out of the country.
For a Cuban passport, I needed my Cuban birth certificate, which had been lost for years. But just at the right time (2009), in God’s time, my dad found my birth certificate. So I was on my way to Cuba by March 2010, with a purpose given to me by the Lord; mentoring women in ministry and advising those in leadership development.
It was the Fall of 2010 in Cuba, and I had just finished travelling around the island meeting Alliance pastors and their wives. In conversing with the women, I would mention my purpose for being in Cuba was to begin working with Alliance women in the churches. More specifically, I told them I wanted to train and encourage the wives of pastors and church planters, most of them being first-generation Christians. Visit after visit, these women began telling me their sad stories of hurt, brokenness, abuse (sexual, verbal, physical—even ritual abuse in the Santeria cult of Cuba), promiscuity, divorces, abandonment, attempted suicide, and more. Their stories moved me profoundly and convinced me we were on the right track in starting this ministry. The women told me they needed inner healing to help bring healing to the many broken women in their house churches.
“Ana’s” story…
Ana’s life before she gave her heart to the Lord Jesus Christ was full of brokenness and sadness. As a child, she was sexually abused by an immediate family member; as a teen, she was raped by a boy in school. Her longing was for a loving, caring relationship with someone. Instead, living in fear of the family member’s harassment led her into marriage at a very young age to escape further abuse. She had longed for the protection of her father but could not even tell him about what the family member had done. To make things even worse, her father committed suicide soon after Ana left home.
Though her husband truly valued and loved her, Ana’s life did not significantly improve. Her husband was addicted to gambling—any kind of gambling—and tended to drink excessively. He would often get into fights and come away with injuries.
Ana came to faith in Jesus after the birth of their two sons. She became an active member of the local Alliance church and her sons also came to faith in Jesus. Ana prayed fervently for the Lord to save her husband. The Lord answered this prayer after she had been praying for him for many years. The transformation in her husband’s life is a beautiful testimony of deliverance from his addictions.
Today “Ana” and her husband Ricardo 2 have studied in the Cuban Bible Institute and are pastoring a church in Central Cuba. 3 “Ana” also went through the Developing a Discerning Heart course in 2012 and experienced deep inner healing as she came to realize her worth in Christ. She knew she was forgiven and could now extend that forgiveness to those who had hurt her deeply. Three years ago, she was elected to serve as the Treasurer of the Cuban Alliance National Church Board.
However, the sadder the stories I heard, the more self-doubt invaded my mind. Once again, I was faced with a spiritual struggle from my first year in Bible college. Whether from my flesh or from the Enemy of my soul or both, I do not know, but the doubts came fast and furious. Thoughts invaded my mind like, Gaileen, what do you think you’re doing here in Cuba? You have nothing to say to these broken women, for your life has been so much easier than theirs. You haven’t experienced even a tiny portion of what they’ve lived through. How can you identify with them? How can you minister to them?
As I heard these accusations, I began to wonder about my ministry’s value to these women. However, through prayer and conversations with my Alliance colleagues in Cuba and Cuban brethren, they assured me I had much to offer these women. Sure, I had not lived through many tragedies in my life, but the testimony of God’s grace in my life and in my family was a rich heritage. I could share this heritage with them. I could pass on the legacy started by my parents in our family. They told me my story gave them hope. Hope? Yes, the hope of, starting with them, things for their children being different, and the sad stories of their lives as parents not being repeated.
Encouraged by their words, I started sharing experiences from my own family life, even in simple day-to-day matters. For example, the first year I was in Cuba, I was at a beach with three pastoral families and their children. When we arrived, the adults settled themselves on the sand under the palm trees; the children ran off into the water. As I observed this, I turned to the parents and told them about my parents and how they played with us as children, sharing beautiful memories of my family at the beach. Then, I told them they should go down into the water and have fun with their children.
Doing this had never occurred to them, as they had not grown up in homes where their parents had fun with them. Nevertheless, these parents joined their children in the water and had a blast; they never forgot this experience.
On other occasions, I would talk to parents about the importance of telling their children they loved them. Many of the pastors and their wives had never heard those words uttered by their own parents; many had never been hugged by their parents. Even though I never married, I shared some tips on parenting and marriage relationships from my family experiences, what I had observed in my own parents, and from my siblings with their children.
However, my greatest desire was to minister to the wives of pastors and church planters who so desperately needed a touch from the Lord in their inner being. This is why we began the women’s ministry for the Alliance in Cuba. Here is what I wrote in a vision statement for the Canadian Alliance office:
“The purpose of the women’s ministry is to strengthen wives of pastors and church planters spiritually through mentoring and training, so that they in turn can do the same with their women leaders and the women in their house groups and communities. Many of these leaders of house groups have felt inadequate to minister to other women because of deep needs and hurts in their own past. The goal is to establish a strong women’s ministry in the country so that marriages and families will not only be strong but healthy, serving as a testimony to a society where most marriages and families are highly dysfunctional.”
To help accomplish this, I was able to have an excellent course translated into Spanish dealing specifically with personal sanctification through the process of inner healing, called Developing a Discerning Heart (DDH). It was written by women for women by Entrust Ministries. I was also able to get the Entrust Ministries course, Facilitating Relational Learning (FRL), translated and used it to prepare facilitators for the women’s ministry, and for pastors in the Cuban Bible Institute. 4 God had allowed me to study both of these courses in the USA before I left for Cuba in 2010.
Many of the women who have gone through these courses have testified how their lives have been transformed. They also say their marriages and families have been impacted by this transformation in their lives. The Alliance Women’s ministry in Cuba grew during the ten years I was there. I left Cuba in July 2019 to begin retirement in January 2020. There are some excellent women leaders in Cuba who have committed themselves to continue the work with women as part of the National Women’s Leadership Team carrying on this ministry across the Island, led by Leslie (Lili), the wife of one of our pastors in Havana. I have been working with and mentoring her since my first year on the Island. The interest in our courses and our ministry to women has extended beyond the Alliance in Cuba to other denominations.
Another way we blessed and encouraged the wives of pastors and church planters in Cuba was to hold retreats for them. We held these for five succeeding years, beginning in 2013. Alliances churches in Canada participated in four of these by sending short-term teams of women to minister and help with some expenses for the retreats. Teams from Canada and IWs from the Caribbean Sun Region also came to help with women’s leadership training sessions.
The Lord gave me the joy of helping to facilitate the DDH course for women IWs from the Caribbean Sun Region and other women leaders in Mexico City in 2017, as well as facilitate FRL to three women leaders of MOPS (Mothers of Pre-schoolers) in Mexico City. Later I helped facilitate the DDH course with national Alliance women leaders in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Guadalajara, Mexico.
Canada Today...
From my experience in Cuba, I believe the Developing a Discerning Heart course can be transformational anywhere it is offered. This has proven true back in Canada, where I have helped facilitate it to a couple of groups of Alliance women in my home church, Sevenoaks Alliance Church in Abbotsford, and from around the province over the past years.
Since my years of working in Cuba with the wives of pastors, a passion that has grown in my heart is the needs of wives of pastors in Canada. Like the women in Cuba, many feel “left behind” as far as spiritual input and training in their lives. The women in Cuba saw their pastor husbands often attend seminars and retreats, but they were back home caring for the children and often for the church ministries. I have some ideas for the years ahead in Canada; we will see if they take off, fall to the ground, get promoted by others, or get postponed until later. I am holding these ideas in my open hands.
Thank You, Lord God, for my ideas that take off and prove to be Your ideas after all! I look forward with excitement to this next part of my sojourn with You. Thank You for my heritage. Thank You that all of this is a gift from You—a lasting legacy of Your love and grace in my life. Amen.
This is an excerpt from the book, On Mission Volume 3. Download your free copy today.
- The Lord led the Canadian Alliance to re-enter Venezuela in 2011 with international workers to assist in work in Caracas to begin a house church. However, worsening political/economic conditions necessitated a departure of all Alliance IWs by 2017.
- The Country Bumpkin, March 14, 2016. https://web.archive.org/ web/20160409211416/http:/www.cmacan.org/stories/the-country-bumpkin
- Developing a Discerning Heart, January 28, 2020. https://www.cmacan.org/ developing-a-discerning-heart/
- See stories published by Gaileen Warden on her ministry in Cuba on the Alliance Canada website at wordpress-680584-3231995.cloudwaysapps.com