Example Update Report From Brazil
Tell us at least 2 stories of what God has done in your church in the past few months and the progress you have made:
There is a specific couple that my wife and I are mentoring/discipling, and they are growing not only in their faith and relationship with Jesus, but also in every area of their lives. And most recently, they shared something that was extremely encouraging to us.
We have been trying to lead them to be baptized and fix their marriage in this process, but they were a bit reluctant about how their families would respond to the baptism specifically.
Meanwhile, we were walking with them, helping, teaching, praying for them as they are part of our small group. Until one day, a couple of weeks ago, the husband, whom I must say was very closed and didn’t share much about his personal struggles and had problems connecting with me in a deeper relationship, came to me and shared how God was talking to them in a very profound way for the past months and how my wife (Mariana) and…
…I were being used by God to help them change their lives and understand more of their purpose here on earth.
While sharing, he said something that impacted tremendously, and that will encourage me for the rest of my life to invest in people.
Here’s what he said: “Gabriel, you and Mariana are our role models and inspiration back home. We want to imitate the way you guys imitate Jesus.”
This impacted us profoundly and we were motivated tremendously. His name is Fabio, and he is almost ten years older than me, he has two kids and after saying that, he told us that they will get married properly and that they want to be baptized, him and his wife, Simone.
Anything else you would like us to know? Any prayer requests? Any messages you want to send to your donor?
The context of this city it’s a bit different than what we normally face while planting a church.
This city has a lot of unhealthy churches, so people have been abused emotionally and spiritually by selfish leaders. We have a lot of corruption spread across the whole city and within the government.
So, the prayer request would be for a healthy church pattern to be established, because the city’s youth is losing itself to drugs, crimes, teenagers and young adults are becoming parents outside of marriage context. And our job is both to gain the unsaved to Christ, but also to help all the lost sheep scattered across this small town of 50k inhabitants.
