Hello!! This past month has been a very busy month!! Just after I wrote my last letter, the ARRIBA group went up to Trujillo to present our program in the different schools for the children. We presented the program 22 different times in 12 different schools. We handed out near to 3,000 tracts and cassettes (containing Bible stories) to the children and teachers. It was great to see hundreds and hundreds of children with tracts and excited about listening to the Bible stories. Pray that the children and families that received the tracts and tapes would be open and that they would accept Christ as their Savior!! We stayed at the Seminario Bautista del Perú (Baptist Seminary of Peru) throughout the week, and it was a tremendous blessing to meet the students and see their excitement for the Lord while preparing for ministry. Annette and I were able to sit in on a few of the classes on the Friday that we were there, and the teaching is excellent there. Pray that the Lord would continue to give the students a desire to learn more and minister. Many of them struggle to make the payments for the year. The tuition for the classes is $75 a semester. Pray that the Lord would continue to provide for them. Over all, it was an exciting week. We were also able to minister in a couple of different churches and spend time with the missionaries in Trujillo.
When we arrived back in Lima, we started our next (and last) class, Personal Evangelism in the Hispanic Culture. This was an excellent class, taught by missionary Gary Whipple. We had several hours of lecture in the mornings and early afternoons, all in Spanish. Amazingly, it was pretty easy to understand. Then in the afternoons we would go out for a couple of hours to witness to the people in the parks and on the streets. We used the verses and the plans of salvation that we had to memorize for the class to witness to the people. Many people were saved and I was able to lead a girl named Susana to Christ. It was amazing, because I knew that God had definitely done all the work. In the beginning of our conversation she said several times that she didn’t understand what I was saying, and I believe that it was the language barrier. But the Holy Spirit worked in her and gave me the words to say, and she accepted Christ as her Savior! What a blessing to be so weak and yet be used by God in this way! Please pray that she will attend the church in Ate (the district in which we were witnessing) and that she would start to grow in her walk with Christ. We finished the class, and this past week we also had our last day of Spanish tutoring class. We will take our final exam Tuesday and Wednesday next week. I am excited to see these come to a close (although I will not have much of a chance to see the language helpers much after this and I will miss them), so that we can start really focusing on the ministry part of our time down here.
Last week, on the Friday the 8th, our church in Musa started a new Kid’s Club up in a different sector in Manchay (a city up in the mountains from Musa). I would guess that a couple of hundred kids were there, and five adults came and were saved. Pastor Evelio would like to start a church up there, and this is how they are planning to start reaching the people. Annette, Caleb, Seth, and I will be working up at the new Kid’s Club for a little while to get things started. Pray that a lot of kids would come! Some people from Buenas Nuevas are also going visiting on Thursday evening to visit the new saved believers and to work on spreading the Gospel of Christ with the people in that area.
We are going to be able to focus more on our ministries now that classes are over, and we are going to be several different things. We will continue working in the kid’s clubs and with Jovenes Menores and Jovenes Mayores. We will continue to be in choir, and we will be taking turns typing out the hymns to sing for the services. The church does not have enough money for hymnals, so we just use sheets of paper with hymns typed out on them. We will be starting our discipleship ministry. I will be starting out discipling Solange, Pastor Evelio’s daughter, and I will probably have another girl that I will be working with also. I am excited to start working on that. We also need to start working on putting the Vacation Bible School programs together, because through the months of January, February, and March we will be doing a lot of things like this.
Buenas Nuevas is in the process of buying the house that Pastor Evelio lives in. The owners are asking for $30,000 within the next couple of months. The Peru Lima Musa Parsonage Project fund has a little more than half of the money needed, which is a great blessing! We need just around $15,000 more to buy the house. The house is used to house Pastor Evelio and his family, and it is also used for Sunday School classes on Sunday mornings. We are praying that the Lord would provide the rest of the money for the Pastoral house. Please pray with us about this need!
Thank you so much for your prayers and financial support for us and the work down here! Thank you for your part in our ministry!
Prayer Requests:
*The children and families that received the tracts and cassettes in Trujillo
*The students in Trujillo for the money to stay at the seminary and their desire to prepare for the ministry that God would have them do
* Susana and the other new believers that were saved during the two weeks of our class
*The new kid’s club in Manchay and the church that Pastor Evelio would like to plant
*The ARRIBA group and our ministries that we will be working in
*For me personally, that I would be a willing vessel and that God would work through me to reach the people here in Peru
*The money for the pastoral house
*The health of Pastor Evelio’s wife, Gloria
*The health of Tito, my little brother down here in Peru, he has been having stomach problems for a while and the doctors do not know why