Bits from the Baja E-mail Update:April 25, 2009

Greetings from the Baja!

Thank you so much for your prayers, especially regarding the youth retreat held during Easter week. The theme was Breaking the Silence, encouraging the youth to share the Gospel with their friends and to live out their faith. One of our youth made a profession of faith during the retreat and several made other commitments regarding being more faithful. Please continue to pray as we seek to disciple and equip our youth to be faithful servants.

Last Sunday, Iglesia Emanuel held another baptism service at the beach. 3 of the 5 were members of our youth group-Ximena, Sinai and Jason. Ximena serves on the activities team for the youth and is from the family we requested prayer for who lost their home to fire caused by an exploding gas tank two years ago. Both Sinai and Jason serve in the youth group on the worship team. Leti is our coworker’s landlady that we reported coming to Christ in December. She had been attending a cell group with her husband and has faced much resistance from other family members because of her commitment to Christ. It was wonderful to see her be baptized and proclaim publically that she is choosing to follow Christ. Enedina has also been attending Iglesia Emanuel for several months and accepted Christ in a cell group. We had the added joy of having friends, Peter and Kathie Woelper, from the states in attendance to witness the service. If you ever want to come down and see personally what the Lord is doing, we would love show you.

Día de Niños is just around the corner and once again we are holding a mini Olympics outreach activity at the church tomorrow afternoon. We would appreciate your prayers that the Lord would use this opportunity to build more relationships in which we can share Christ, especially to the community surrounding the church.

Thank you so much for your prayers, encouragement and support. We appreciate your willingness to be a part of our team! Phil & Pattie

The pictures are from the retreat and the baptism. The retreat picture is of a very tired group upon our return, outside the church. The baptism picture is of the 5 who were baptized with the church leadership. (L to R: Enedina, Felix, Ximena, Mauricio, Leti, Art, Sinai, Jason, Phil & Pedro.) As soon as time allows, there will be more pictures posted online.

Our Youth Playing Soccer

These are pictures from a recent youth group meeting. The youth were playing soccer at the park across the street from the church.

E-mail Update from April 3, 2009

As Easter draws near, we cannot help but reflect even more on the wonderful sacrifice of Christ and the privilege we have to follow Him. We are so grateful for the privilege to serve Him here and share the Good News of a Savior with those who are dying without Him. Thank you for your prayers, encouragement and support that make it possible for us to be here to share Christ.

Before beginning our ministry update, we have a personal request. About a week ago, Luke started to have more problems breathing. After visiting two doctors, he was diagnosed with having had a bad asthma attack. From what we understood, he most likely has reactive airway and should grow out of it. He is doing much better now, but we would appreciate your prayers for him to continue improving and that in spite of the dusty environment, he would not have any more major problems.

For this update, we want to focus on our youth since there are some exciting items to report as well as important requests.

SJC: Soldados de Jesucristo/Soldiers of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 6)
A short time ago, our youth chose this name for our youth group. It is a play on “words” since our city is abbreviated SJC as well. We felt the name they chose was a fitting description of our goal for them to become equipped and grounded firmly in their faith so that they will be reflections of Christ to all those with whom they come in contact.
Thank you for your prayers as we began a new “era” this year, encouraging them to be more involved with leading the group. This has been training and equipping them to serve. It continues to be thrilling to see several of them growing and maturing. As a step of maturity, two of our youth have decided to be baptized later this month.
Next week (April 9-12), we will be taking approximately 12 of our youth about 120 miles north to La Paz for a youth retreat. The theme is Breaking the Silence (Rom. 1:16), encouraging them to share their faith. The main speaker will be using the life of Daniel as an example which is the book of the Bible our youth have already been studying. We will both participate with several other adults by giving workshops to the youth on Thursday and Friday (using music-Phil & creatively sharing the gospel with children-Pattie). Please, pray for us to speak clearly and that the Lord would use the workshops for His glory in spite of our imperfect Spanish. Saturday the youth will be using the skills learned in the workshops by putting on an evangelistic outreach in a very needy neighborhood.

We pray you have a blessed time remembering and celebrating God’s greatest gift!
Phil, Pattie & Family