Peter Hoover
Plain Folk
Peter Hoover was born in 1960 in Kitchener, Ontario and raised in an Old Order Mennonite community with horses and buggies, no electricity and no telephones. As a sixteen-year-old he began to attend revival meetings in a more progressive Mennonite church, was baptized there and later started teaching school in northeastern Ontario.
In 1981 he was married to Susan Krahn who was from a Mexican Old Colony Mennonite family, and set out at once to begin church planting among impoverished villagers at Rancho La Jarita, Chihuahua, Mexico. Ordained to ministry in the Mennonite village of Gnadenfeld, near Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua, Peter taught at Messiah Bible School (Conservative Mennonite) in Ohio, in El Salvador and Costa Rica, and became involved in German, Spanish and later English-language writing and publishing (school texts, etc.) In 1989 the family moved to Costa Rica to help out in Spanish language publishing work, church planting and teaching in inner city schools in San José and Cartago.
Over time Peter found himself increasingly distressed by social inequality, in particular the vast differences of opportunity between missionary families and those they came to minister to. This contributed to an increasing interest in the early Christian model of having a "community of goods" between believers. After extensive church work throughout Central and South America, especially in Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname, Peter and family came to the Chilean Lake District (Puerto Montt) in 1999 to help establish new church community. Later they spent time with church communities in New Zealand, America and Australia, where they chose to become part of a Hutterite colony in Rocky Cape, Tasmania.
Over time Peter's involvement with communities, and contacts arising from his writing, have led him to people seeking Christian communitarian lifestyles in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovakia and elsewhere.
Peter writes the "Sunlit Kingdom letters" and is author of the following books:
Secret of the Strength
What Would the Anabaptists Tell This Generation?
The Russian Secret
The Mystery of the Mark
Anabaptist Missions under the Fire of God
Links to download his eBooks can be found at the bottom of the following Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hoover
Peter Hoover can be reached via:
Rocky Cape Christian Community
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Why build spiritual bridges?
Most of us have been exposed to the huge ecumenical push of recent decades, and have also seen that this push seems headed towards creating a dumbed down oneness that may eventually include holding hands with the Pope, moderate Islam and the New Age and saying that we “all worship the same God”. So it’s easy for us to react against it and become more isolationist and protective than ever. But, in the end this only results in the true testimony being weakened, while the tares are left to take over. It seems that the wheat, God’s people, need more than ever at this time to build bridges with one another, to learn from one another, to strengthen one another, and to be together a clear New Testament witness to this generation.
Who are the ambassadors in this section?
Each of the “ambassadors” listed in this section of the website have accepted the invitation to represent “their people” (group / denomination / etc), and to be a point of contact for answering questions, helping people find other spiritually sound representatives of “their people” in various locations, and being available to speak in churches or other such meetings of denominational and non-denominational groups. We hope this will provide just one practical means of opening doors between different parts of the body of Christ. Note that these people are not necessarily formal denominational representatives and therefore claim no special endorsement other than their willingness to build bridges and communicate.