Coming Back from Furlough

Well we’ve been back here in Brazil a month now and I think our bodies are finally adjusted from leaving the cold winter there to coming back to the middle of a hot summer here. It was so good to spend time with you and worship with you during furlough. We wish you could see Aubry’s two new teeth. All the Brazilians say she’d grown so much while we were away. We are glad to be back and back into our ministry here. We had to hit the ground running and here are some of the happenings from this past month back…

Evangelism Series

In Brazil, February (or March depending on when Carnival is that year) is the time for new beginnings. After Carnival is over people come back from summer vacations, school starts back, and people get ready to truly begin their year. We wanted to start off this year with a focus on evangelism. We have over 30 members now who can reach out as well (if not better) than us missionaries. We began an 8 week Sunday School class on training them to teach an evangelistic one on one Bible study with friends and family. The study itself is 8 weeks and the lessons are: Purpose of Life- To Glorify God, O.T. God wants a relationship with His People, What Is Sin, Life of Jesus, Teachings of Jesus, Baptism, Church, and Holy Spirit. After studying the first we had a practice day this past Sunday after church March 2^nd where they paired up and practiced with each other. Our members are becoming more motivated to share God’s word and we recently have three new studies. Please pray for upcoming studies and especially for Messias as he is nearing the end of studying these lessons and says he wants to be baptized when he finishes.

Sermon Series

Also, to begin the year we wanted to define our Identity a little better in a city with so many religions and churches and denominations. Since most churches here lack a sense of community, we decided to focus on our identity as a Family of God. Each week we have emphasized four values: Authenticity, Growth, Invitation, and Healthy Theology. Both the Identity sermon series and our evangelism Sunday School series will take us through to our Anniversary service on April 6^th.

First Pot-luck of the year

Our first potluck of the year was a hit, we had 81 in attendance! This is about 30 more than usual. Our Brazilians love to invite on potluck days!

Baby Jackson Turner Quirey

Baby Jackson Turner was born the same day as the potluck February 17^th at 5:31 pm to his proud parents Russell and Valerie Quirey (for those of you who know Matt Quirey – he is now a first time uncle). J.T. weighed 7lbs and 2oz and was 20 inches long. He is just beautiful. Our team is still awaiting baby Porter in a week or so and we just found out that there is a new baby Sass due in August.

You didn’t know this is what our team meant by growing the church!!!

Women’s Ministry

We’ve had a couple of baby showers recently. We’ve also started our monthly Christian disciplines lessons again. This month Jennifer taught on service. We had a nice luncheon and about 20 women attended. Next month will be Mary Virginia’s lesson on confession.

Youth Back To School Party

We were so proud of our youth at their back to school party. They brought visitors and showed off what they’d learned. We had 25 Brazilian kids. They won prizes of school supplies for answering questions about the devo lessons over the past 4 months. We’ve been studying about God’s work among the men and women of the Old Testament and some of the questions were pretty hard.

The Youth leaders (Matt, Mary Virginia, Randy, Jennifer, and a young Brazilian couple Tennyson and Diana) are spending once a week for 6 weeks together in prayer for the youth ministry. We are praying for God’s guidance, growth, a multi-generational vision committee, and a Brazilian male intern.

New Church Secretaries

We still can’t afford to hire a church secretary so some of our Brazilian women stepped up to the plate! We now have three women volunteering at the church in order to keep the building open and help out at the church (especially with all of the team women being pregnant or with little babies to care for)! Their biggest project lately is mail-outs to all of the visitor cards we have received over the last year in order to invite people to our big church anniversary beginning of April and our English classes that begin the end of this month. Our new volunteers are Luciana, Diana, and Cremilda and we don’t know how we ever got along without them now!