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Mauricio Miranda was comfortable. For 10 years, he had served as pastor of a Pentecostal church in downtown Cúcuta, Colombia. His church was modest but established, and so was his life. Every Monday, he woke up knowing what to expect: Wednesday night service, Sunday service, discipleship groups, sermon prep in between.
“It was a pretty normal, typical church,” Miranda said. “People came to services, I preached, we said goodbye, and people went back home.”
But after 10 years, Miranda was restless. “I felt that we were not doing enough,” he recalled. He just couldn’t articulate exactly what “enough” was.
Cúcuta is Colombia’s sixth-largest municipality and sits on the country’s border with Venezuela. Miranda’s church was about a 20-minute drive from the Simón Bolívar International Bridge, a 315-meter structure that’s one of the busiest border crossings in South America, generating up to $8 billion a year in trade.
At the time, people on both sides crisscrossed the border bridge as breezily as if they were visiting a neighbor. Those who’d grown up in Cúcuta remember sauntering to the other side to get Popsicles on hot afternoons. Children in school uniforms scampered over the bridge to attend classes. Families from Venezuela attended church services in Colombia.
And then in 2015—after a series of violent disputes between the two countries—the border closed. A year later, when the bridge briefly reopened to pedestrians, traffic no longer flowed both ways. By then, Venezuela had collapsed into a full-scale humanitarian crisis. Nearly 200,000 Venezuelans crossed the bridge into Colombia in just a few days. Many of them traveled back and forth to stock up on essential supplies, but as the crisis worsened, more and more Venezuelans stayed in Colombia. In 2015, 31,000 Venezuelans lived there. By 2019, that number was almost 1.8 million.
In August 2016, ...