New Families in Church!

Howdy! We have excitting news! Check out our prayer letter bellow:

Greetings in our Lord, Brethren!

Wow, I ought to ask you more often to pray for specific needs! You people are awesome! Several of our requests have been granted us by our Graceful Father! Thank you, Brethren, for your labors in prayer with us!

The Lord has been answering our prayers and blessing our ministry. You see, for some time we’ve been praying that our presence here might be useful to help structure the church and to cause its edification both in maturity and numbers. We’ve prayed about Cláudio, asking the Lord to strengthen him to step up to his calling as leader; we’ve prayed asking for more men to get involved in the leadership; we’ve prayed that more families come to church; we’ve prayed that the existing families turn up the fire and make real commitments to the Lord and His work.

In wonderful ways the Lord has been answering all of these prayers. Cláudio had seemed to be distracted by some of his occupations, and now he’s seen his error and is more involved with the leadership than ever before. He’s even requested that he preach twice monthly in the main service on Sunday nights! You must know that this means that he would preach as much as the “official” pastor. But I don’t mind – actually I’m glad it is so! When we leave the church as we’re planning, he will be ready, and so will the church.

As for other men stepping up to the leadership, none have done so officially, but in practice I’ve had three who said it with all the words: “sometime in the near future I’d like to be an active leader.” Besides these three, two others have said the same things with their actions. In fact, the other day I was pulled aside during a visit to the new member Diego and he said: “About the conference coming up, do you need any help? Put me to work – I’ll set time apart for this.” Never before have I had people request to get involved like this! I sincerely hope that in the next year or two we can leave the church with a few more leaders and more on the way to become leaders!!!

Our prayer for new families began to be answered when Eduardo and Rose with their four kids started coming to church. We began a home Bible study with them on Thursdays, and at the same time began a home Bible study on Tuesdays with João and his family. Only João went to church at the time, his wife being Catholic and their son, torn between the two, went to neither… For several months now João has been coming to church with his whole family! So the Lord had given us two new families! Recently, Eduardo brought his old friend Diego to church – Diego and Talita (and two small kids) had been looking for a church in which to serve the Lord and learn His ways. On their first visit they decided to stay with us. At the time I was traveling down south. Imagine my surprise when I come back to a bigger church! Diego and Talita have been with us only a few weeks and already have managed to get involved with the cleaning ministry, steady financial support, a weekly home Bible study, a weekly child raising course (began March 4th), and also the organizational work for our conference on the 21st through 24th of February. Where do you find this kind of family??? Needless to say, we’re soooooooo blessed with the Lord’s answer to that prayer for new families. Oh, and back to João’s family, we’ve reached his sister through the Bible studies. She just joined our church!

Our prayer that the older families in church turn up the fire and commit has been answered too. Slowly but surely we’ve seen growth in commitment levels. Cláudio’s and Ricardo’s family have definitely grown, and they have been setting a good example as leaders. A pleasant surprise was Paulo and Nancy’s family – they had been somewhat distant and lukewarm, but recently they’ve become more involved, especially in the financial department – they’ve given several rows of the new chairs we decided to buy, and also new wall fans (and Paulo installed them too! It was funny to see him up in the roof/attic messing with all the wires and getting all dirty, hahaha). Besides, he’s made himself available to my call for anything I need, due to the special relationship we have. (Wow!)

New life has been breathed into our church, and we’re close to having seating problems. Our average attendance has gone from 15-20 to 25-30, and if everyone decides to come together we’ll be maxed out! I count over 45 members, and that’s our maximum possible seating. Talk of a new building has already started. Maybe to some of you 45 members isn’t much, but to us it’s a whole lot more than it was when we got here three years ago!!!

Our annual conference was so stirring! Our church hosted the Rio Claro church, and the interchurch fellowship was sweet. Folks are talking about how homey it felt, with that sweet intimate feeling of brotherly love. The messages were touching, the special music was beautiful, the youth were relatively spiritual (which is a victory), the fellowship was much better than in past years, and the food was pretty good too! It was amazing to see how many brothers voluntarily got busy with all the conference projects.

Speaking of projects, the brethren are so fired up that we have about three projects going on simultaneously. I’d like to ask for your prayers regarding these projects.The first and foremost is the Fellowship Area Project: we’re expanding our building! We need a decent place in which to come together for fellowship dinners or any other such activity, so we’re expanding the church building. I’d like to ask for prayers specially for Eduardo, the main fellow behind this project. He says this is important because it will help bring the brethren closer together (to which I whole-heartedly agree!).

The second project is the building of the Church Website: we’re building a site to reach out to our local community with the gospel of the grace of God, as well as a means of bringing edifying material to our brethren. Eduardo is also the primary brother working on this project. Can you tell he’s fired up? We’re praying that the youth will also get involved with the website ministry.

The third project is the purchase of a Volkswagen Van for church related transport. We use the services of school vans often, but they’re kind of pricey. My dad had one such van, and so we traded our car for his van. We’ll sell it to the church yet this year. In the meantime we already are saving quite a bit of money by using our van to transport the youth to church on Sunday mornings.

By the way, if some of you folks want to follow up on our work on the web, I’m working on a blog. Check it out, read our updates and look at the pictures! The address is www.paulbert.blogspot.com .

My email continues as paulemariana@yahoo.com.br, and I would like to request feedback on two things: my blog (how it can be better), and how to build a good church website. Those of you with experience please share your feedback because we need help setting goals and adding material (messages, special songs, written studies).

Thanks again to you all for your prayers. The Lord has been blessing them. Thanks for your support in every way!

Our love to you in Christ Jesus, Paul and Mariana Craesmeyer