May ’15 Prayer Letter – Mark and Aura Pereira

[Click here for PDF version PEREIRA 5-15]

Can a group of 11 people from a church in TN come to Portugal for a week and make a difference towards reaching Portugal with the Gospel of Christ? Definitely! That is exactly what happened this month. We are thankful for these dear people out of South Haven Baptist Church, for their hard work, their attitude and obvious love for souls. With their help, we completed our goal to distribute almost 50 thousand pieces of Gospel literature in the North part of Lisbon. We were also happy to see already specific contacts come from that literature distribution.

We are thankful for all that have cooperated in this specific church plant project. Bro. Jeremy Rowland, of Baptist Church Planting Ministry was here with his family. BCPM has been a great help. They provided all the John and Romans for this project and paid for them to be shipped to Portugal. There were also several churches in Portugal that helped along the way and with this specific campaign. The cooperation of the churches in Portugal is something that we want to continue to see and deepen in the future as the Lord allows us to be involved in starting the next church plants.

All of that was done surrounding the organization of a new church in the city of Castanheira do Ribatejo, North of Lisbon. This was a church plant that we started almost 3 years ago when I was still pastoring the church in Albufeira. The organization service was on June 14^th and I will not be able to describe with words just how special that was. What a joy it was to see the new pastor of the church in Albufeira, Bro. Lenildo (my Timothy, even though he is 10 years older than me), recognize the independence of the Castanheira church and the pastoral leadership of Bro. Tito (the most recent pastor we’ve seen ordained). There were special services to introduce the new church to the community. These services were well attended, there were first time visitors, returning visitors and an attendance of over 50 people.

We continue to pray for the Lord to call more missionaries to come to Portugal and for believers in Portugal to be called into full time Christian service. We are ready for both situations. Our Bible Institute is already being used to train the next generation of church planters in Portugal.

We are doing well and, apart from allergies, staying healthy. Aura has had the chance of helping her parents get the camp property ready for the summer camps. Church in Castelo Branco is doing well and we’ve had an increase in attendance. We are happy to see some one-on-one Bible studies going on and we’re about to start a teen Sunday School Class.

In His Service, Mark and Aura Pereira