The only family which adds children more frequently than newsletters. (Don’t panic – still just the 5 children!)
Dear Friends,
I just wanted to give everyone a quick update on our church building situation. About midway through January we moved out of the place where we had spent the previous seven years and moved into the property of a theological seminary belonging to the Baptist Convention here in Santa Cruz. We have pretty much exclusive use of their large meeting hall, and share the seminary classrooms with them. So far the arrangement seems to be working out really well. They get extra money coming in each month from us and we get a meeting place for much lower than a commercial rent would be. And as an added bonus, 3 people from our church have signed up to study specific courses with the theological seminary so will be getting training which will help grow the church as well!
In the meantime we continue to struggle through what seems like a never-ending stream of paperwork which will hopefully enable us one day to buy our own place.
Each year over the long Carnival weekend, which coincides with Shrove Tuesday, we host our church camp in our house. This year we had Pepe and Veronica with us from Mexico. Pepe leads a thriving church in the city of Leon and this was their second visit to Santa Cruz; the first one having been for a couple of weeks while we were in the UK last year.
They both have great teaching gifts and a sense of fun, backing up the teaching that they brought with activities and games that helped to reinforce the main points. We had between 60 and 70 people staying over, those numbers swelling to around 80 during the day. And on the Sunday morning we were able to celebrate the baptism of 3 of our young people.
All in all we had a wonderful time with a few people commenting that it was one of our best camps yet!
We’d appreciate your prayers for:
