Monday, June 18, 2007

Welcome to our Blog

As technology changes we change with it. We are ever looking for new and exciting ways to keep you our supporters informed as to what is going on in our world. From the years of snail mail news letters things have changed a lot: black text with no pictures to BLOGS, paper which often got misplaced to online storage of information ever ready at our fingertips. We hope to be able to keep you better informed more often and we don't want to hear, "we misplaced that one."

Comunidad Cristiana Candelero (El Candelero Christian Community)
The CCC is a church plant which came out of ministry in El Candelero. For those of you who are new to our letters, El Candelero is a coffee house ministry in which an average of about 350+ students and families visit every day. About 2 1/2 years ago we started a church with only a handful of national people. We now have over 20 members and about 100 weekly attenders to our Sunday service. One of our purposes as a church is to draw people in who are not attending church anywhere else. It is exciting to see whom the Lord draws to our church and more exciting to see whom he draws to himself. We are so thankful for David Fuertes, a national businessman, who does the majority of the preaching. Colleen, my wife, helps out a lot worship leading. God has given her a special gift with music and we have grown to appreciate her voice and for me...her good looks too. Really though she has been finding it hard. As much as she loves music and loves to sing she feels she isn't a leader and finds it hard to be firm with the worship team in the times when they need it the most. Joelle our daughter, although she isn't in this picture, is helping out as well in the worship and seems to be going after her mom with the singing thing.

Joelle is also helping out by teaching one of the preschool Sunday school class. She is really enjoying that. Joelle is also involved with Kings Kids, a division of Youth With a Mission. This ministry has really helped Joelle build her self confidence and more importantly her spiritual gifts.

The focus of my time in the CCC has been with the youth. Up until now we have one youth group from the ages of 13 to 30 something. Over the last couple of years the group has really grown and it is time for a split. We are going to be seperating the group into youth and college and career groups. I will be leading the college and career group while one of the young adults from the college group will lead the youth group.

The youth group isn't the only group that has been growing. The entire church body has grown so much in the last little while that we are in great need for more space. We have discussed renting appartment which is at the back of the location we now are renting but were encouraged by our mission that instead of paying almost $800US per month we should consider the posability of buying something. The owner of the place where we are now is not interested in selling and so we are not sure in what direction we will go. We are in desperate need for space. In our Sunday school we have only two classrooms with at times over 30 kids. We are also very limited with discipleship classes as we don't have enough space.

I have also been teaching a midweek bible study to an upper class couples group. This study has been going on for over almost 4 years. We are at the point of dropping this study to start up another study for couples and older singles in our church. This group has really grown in numbers in the last year and as a church we are not offering any special study for them. We feel it is time to offer them something. Because we just don't have enough days in a week we found we needed to drop something else to make this study possible.


A Satanist is in Our Midst!
Not too long ago one of our youth came to talk to me about a deep concern she had. She was very worried for her older brother. Over the last year he has been showing less and less interest in the church and his parents who also aren't very faithful in the church have been trying to force him to go to church hoping he will shape up. He has also become more and more critical of the church and God wanting to do everything that is totally the opposite. As she was telling me all these things I still wasn't prepared for what she told me next. She went on to say that he has made a pact with Satan and calls himself Satan's son. He feels he is a special child and Satan has a special plan for him. He feels that as a Satanist he can do what he wants and as a follow of Jesus they are restricted to only serving Him. He has openly cursed his sister hoping that she will see that God is not real. In the last year she has been hospitalized several times.