The Los Angeles - Mexico Connection

Highlights of the Last Month

Mexico We had a great time in Mexico visiting Fabiola’s home church and family – we came home with renewed energy and refreshed vision. We were there during a week of prayer and fasting and were able to minister in various other settings the second week. We spent as much time as possible with Fabiola’s parents and sister and were able to see some other aunts, uncles and cousins as well. It is interesting the connections between Mexico and Los Angeles. There is a lady that recently started visiting our church in Los Angeles that has family in Puebla so while we were there we visited her mother and daughter (pictured below) and prayed for them and got to know the family better. After giving updates and/or preaching at the different churches and services various people would come up to us as well and share that they had family in Los Angeles and gave us their contact information so that we could give them a call and a visit. Los Angeles is the second largest “Mexican” city in the world (second only to Mexico City). Amazing to think there are less Mexicans living in Puebla, Mexico (a fairly large city) than Los Angeles! Below: Fabiola and a group head to prayer in the back of a cargo van at 5:30 am.
Below: Every morning the church nearly filled up for the 2 ½ hour morning prayer meeting.
Above & Below: Chad was invited to minister in the juvenile jail in Puebla (pictured here with the team that went in with him). This is where youth go for serious crimes and they are housed there until they end their sentence (so there are many 14 year olds with 25 year olds).
One prisoner knew our neighborhood here in L.A. very well as well as the gangs around us – in fact he was convicted of murdering four people in Los Angeles. He is currently locked up for killing another person in Puebla. We had a strong, but sobering conversation. He is having a hard time believing he could ever be a changed person as all he has ever known his whole life is gangs and violence, but God is moving on his heart.

Below: The prayer meeting at night filled up an even larger auditorium. The worship was powerful and really inspired us to continue to pray and work towards raising-up more worshippers here in Los Angeles.

While We Were Gone
As we mentioned last month, while we were gone in Mexico things in Los Angeles continued as normal. We have been working hard to encourage and equip the congregation to minister to one another. Merced (pictured on the left in the picture below) did a great job teaching and leading the Wednesday night group. We hope that in the next month or two he and his wife will begin to lead a small group on their own in a different part of town. Please pray for wisdom in the timing and manner in which we go about starting that new group. Abraham (pictured with the guitar) also did a great job leading worship. This last Sunday we had one of the most powerful times of worship we’ve had as a congregation as Abraham lead worship and I just accompanied him with the guitar and voice.
This last Sunday we just shared testimonies from Mexico and a short message and had Adelso (pictured in bottom picture) share a message from Romans 8.

This seems to be a bit of a pruning season – while our core group is getting stronger some of those that are more on the outskirts have seemed to have grown more distant. Please pray for those that have distanced themselves from us, the church and God.


Upcoming Events (please pray):

·Marriage Conference (February 26; 9am – 4pm)
Pray for a large turnout of people from our church and the community.
Pray for the time with the children to go smoothly (6 hours of activities for a wide range of ages is a long time!).

·Leaders Meeting (February 26; 7pm)
We will have Pastors Felipe & Judy Jaquith from Puebla, Mexico with us to share a special message.
We hope to begin to implement a regular planning, prayer and leadership development time that can pull those showing leadership skills or potential together and allow us to grow beyond what Fabiola and I can do for the church. This will be the first one.

·Special Sunday Service with Pastor Felipe. The message will be on FAMILIES (February 27; 10am)
Pray for a large turnout of people from our church and the community.
Pray that the message Pastor Felipe brings will go deep into our hearts and become something we really live out.

·VBS: Bible Club (First week of March)
Pray that we will make a lot of new contacts and people will be hungry to know more about God and get connected to the church.
Pray that the church will begin to take more and more ownership on these outreaches.

Thank you for praying with us and believing with us for a “healed land”

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14

Chad & Fabiola

Marriage Conference

During this month of love and friendship, we are excited to be holding our first ever marriage conference at our church.  Leading up to the conference, on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, we will be showing the powerful movie Fireproof and ask that you would pray that God would draw couples together and to Himself through this movie.  We hope that it will be a special event.  We are asking that every couple prayerfully consider inviting other couples out as well so there is potential to touch a lot of couples. Though there has been an improvement in the participation of men recently, the majority of people who come to study and worship with us are still women and children which is another reason this marriage focus is so important. 

The weekend following the movie we will have the marriage conference where couples will be able to get away and focus on God and one another.  We have a line-up of great teaching, prayer times, powerful activities for the couples to work through and some fun games as well.  Please pray for all the details involved in putting this event on and that it would be an encounter with God that would cause lasting change in these relationships. 

“More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse” (Doug Larson).  Many of our couples have come to us at the lowest point of their relationship – the worse – and we need to help and equip them to understand that God wants them to not only survive, but find great success.  Many are losing their grip and ready to give up.   Most have never had anything good or godly modeled to them.  Not only couples, but entire families are at stake.  We desire to help them understand that they can come together in sacrificial love and raise-up the next generation in godliness and blessing by God’s grace and power. 

As we ask you to pray for one other area this month, let us share how great it is to see people stepping up in service.  Recently we had to be out of town during our regularly scheduled weekly meetings and instead of canceling the meetings we had Merced led the Bible study and Abraham the worship with others helping in other areas.  What a great experience they had, not just in the doing, but also in preparing with us ahead of time as we had the honor to pass on the things that we have learned from God and others to equip them to serve and guide their brothers and sisters.  Please pray for continued growth of these rising leaders and servants.  Also pray for wisdom on the manner and timing of releasing various people into the many needs of our young church.  We are especially praying about what to do about our thriving children’s and youth ministries as our interns phase out this coming summer and beyond. 

May God’s most amazing love pour down on you this month,

Y Chad & Fabiola