Young Professional Small Group at Our House

Our small group has grown since the Auburn group has been here. The girls have been inviting their readers to come and we have had several visitors. We are trying to get our group of young professional / college age youth to a more regular attendance. Please pray that this group continues to grow in number and in Spirit.

Kathryn and Parks and Rice and Beans

Kathryn and Parks came for 2 weeks to help with the LST campaign, help paint the upstairs of our building, and start up a church-wide service project in our new neighborhood. They worked hard as well and are going to continue supporting a monthly meal outreach for our church to provide our community. We were sad to see them go home but extremely glad they got to come. Aubry and Nalah will definitely miss them too!

Auburn Thursday Night Parties

The English parties have been so much fun this year. Our first party was a 4th of July party, our second a western party, our third was the Auburn party and our fourth was the Christmas party. The Luau next Thursday night is our fifth and final cultural get together to connect our English students with our church members. The missionaries will continue to study the Bible with those English students who have been spiritually interested in the studies.

Auburn Group Arrives – Matt and all the girls!

The same day that the Highland campaign group left, the Auburn LST group arrived. There are 3 girls (Lindsey, Danielle, and Tiffany) and 2 boys (Lucas and Lee) in the group who came to teach English using the Bible – the book of Luke. The girls are staying with us and their first night they got here we blew the main breaker in the house! Poor Matt with 6 girls in the house: 3 LST girls, Heather, me Aubry, and even the dog is a female. He was sure glad to see Kathryn and Parks arrive to have another guy in the house.

First Service in the New Building!!!

We had our first service together in our new building. Antenor Goncalves was our guest speaker that day and our building looked completely transformed – talk about an extreme make-over! Praise God for small miracles and brothers and sisters in Christ!

Youth Retreat - Conquerors or Wanderers?

We had a full house at youth retreat this year (literally). We took the campaign group with us to a town about an hour away and all stayed together in a big house with 12 bedrooms. We had 23 total Brazilian kids almost all of whom we’ve been studying the Bible with on Friday nights for a while now. The theme was Kadesh and whether these kids will be conquerors or wanderers. One of the Highland youth went home and was baptized afterwards and one of our Brazilian kids came back from the retreat wanting to study more one on one about baptism. A special thank you to the Brimingham and Maynard families for making this youth retreat possible. Their contribution secured us the place for the retreat.

VBS

The campaign group put on two afternoon VBS’s. One was in the neighborhood where we have one of our biggest weekly church small groups. And the other was in the neighborhood near the new church building at the apartment complex of the Sasses. Both were major successes and the campaigners even went back later to play soccer with some of those kids.

Highland Campaign

We don’t know how we would have moved out of our old buiding and into our new building without the campaign group from Highland coming to help us. They came in the middle of June and did everything from cleaning and painting and packing and unpacking to VBS and youth retreat. It was also good to have Phyllis and Antenor with us (a missionary couple from the South of Brazil) who taught a couples class and did a lot of translation work and errands. We worked the entire campaign group very hard and were blessed by their presence, encouragement, and hard labor.

Aubry Talking and Walking