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Yesterday was the last Sunday with Aura’s parents before their 8 month furlough in the US. The Lord blessed and we had great services with some visitors returning and one lady visiting for the first time. This church plant and the camp ministry will be our main focus until the Newtons come back next year. Please pray for us as we go out into this community trying to meet new people. Pray that the Lord will guide our steps to the right people. We will be joining the same community choir the Newtons are part of. This has proved to be a great way to meet people. Also pray for us as we minister to the people already at the church. We will be starting our kids’ club and youth activities. As always pray for lost people to get saved and saved people to grow in the Lord.
This month we had the ordination service for Bro. Tito. What a privilege it was to be part of that. Bro. Lenildo, who we saw ordained just a year ago, led the ordination council as moderator and led his church in the whole ordination process. He announced to the church that it is his prayer that the church in Albufeira could make this a yearly event. Wouldn’t that be something if that church started ordaining people for the ministry of the Gospel at a regular basis? Present in the service were all three pastors that have been ordained under our ministry in the last 3 years. What a blessing! What a God we have!
I was asked to preach and I shared with the church once again that we are praying that we can see, in our life time, 70 new churches started in the country of Portugal. I also shared with the pastors present the need to invest in training people for the ministry. It is not only the church in Albufeira that needs to be ordaining people once a year. All the churches in Portugal should have this as their goal! The training center that we want to start will have the goal of helping churches do just this. We don’t want to train other church’s workers (even though we want to train the ones the Lord gives us). But if we can help churches do this, that would be great. We will do this through quality Bible Institute materials, seminars for pastors and on-going training and support.
While visiting the church in Albufeira, it was great to see everyone, specially the new believers that we baptized before going to the States last year. One lady said, “pastor, I don’t have all things figured out yet, but the Lord has been doing great things in my life!” Pray for the souls in Portugal.