Pillars

Having a “Heart 4 the City” isn’t just a nice phrase we use to describe our mission work, but really our life. We desire to stand up and be strong in God’s strength to help bring light and hope in a hurting and broken place. As we’ve taken time to survey the needs of our community there are certain needs that keep coming up: specifically, the need for a better and Biblical understanding of marriage and family, leadership development, and freedom from gang violence, domestic violence and drug and alcohol abuse. By God’s grace and power and the various activities this month all of those needs have been addressed in some way through this ministry…and we are excited about even more to come. Please read these updates and pray with us!

Marriage Conference

We got great feedback - we will definitely be doing more events like this in the future. We did not reach our goal of 10 couples, but those that came out were greatly blessed and now that everyone knows what this “marriage conference” thing is more people will invite their friends and come out for future events like this one. Also, a team from Fuente para las Naciones and a group of volunteers had a fantastically successful time with the children and youth all day, which shows us that we can do events like this in the future with the needed help.

The sign-in table at the conference.

We completely transformed our house moving out the majority of the furniture to set up for this special event.

We broke the various sessions up to play fun games that unified and challenged the individual couples and the group as a whole.

We had a great lunch – which actually was one of the best parts of the conference because it gave everyone a chance to really reflect and share what they were learning and going through in their married life.

Leader’s Meeting & Special Sunday Service
It was such an honor for us to have Fabiola’s pastors from Puebla, Mexico come visit us. Everyone was very excited to be able to hear Pastor Felipe teach on the family and sign their copy of his book that we had recently finished studying together. During our leader’s meeting people were impacted by the message and challenge shared. He taught that each emerging leader needed to be a strong pillar in the church: people with devotion to Christ, good character and faithful, loving service to the Body and not just talent or desire to serve in some specific ministry in order for the church to grow strong and be able to continue to grow. The idea of building on weak pillars and the building collapsing has come up several times in discussions with various leaders over the last few weeks. It was encouraging too how the same key points were weaved together throughout the whole weekend – at the marriage conference, the leader’s meeting and the Sunday service. The same themes of family, the church, devotion to God and leadership were repeated in creative and powerful ways.

Pastor Felipe Jaquith preaching at our Sunday service

Pastors Felipe & Judy Jaquith and some of the leaders at Fuente para las Naciones praying for us as the pastors of this new church.

Pastor Felipe helps Abraham grill up the carne asada after service.

After the service we set up tables to enjoy an amazing meal and
great fellowship together.

Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast
We were given tickets to attend the Los Angeles Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast and took four of our emerging leaders with us. It was a huge honor for all of us to be at an event attended by so many civic and spiritual leaders from the Los Angeles area. As we prayed and listened to different speakers, including the mayor, it stirred up our faith to continue to press in to what God has for us as a new church so that we can see His Kingdom come not only in our South Park neighborhood, but throughout Los Angeles and throughout the earth.

Top row: Merced, Abraham, Chad and intern Jessica. Bottom row: Erica, Nancy, and intern Monica

Bible Club
A group from Northwestern College came to help us put on a four day Bible club at the park in front of our house. Over the four days we had close to 100 children come out and made some really good connections with the parents too, especially on the last day when we had a talent show and BBQ for the whole family and were able to laugh, eat and connect with them more. In the next 2-3 weeks we will be doing more follow-up with these families visiting all the children in their homes. At least 15 of the children made first-time commitments to follow Jesus, give Him control of their life and be truth seekers. Four of the women from the church came out on various days to help with checking in the children, organizing and preparing the BBQ – this is a good step towards our goal to have more ownership and leadership from within our growing church community.
Another thing we were able to do with this group and some other friends that were visiting from Portland was go on an extensive, specific prayer walk through our neighborhood touching on specific needs and seeing some of them answered right before our eyes.

Fabiola sharing the gospel with one of the mother’s of a child that came out to our Bible Club.

Our theme was “Mission Possible: Truth Seekers” so the lessons were taught by a detective and the kid’s were encouraged to be actively seeking the Truth.

We all started and ended together, but then the children were grouped by ages and rotated between three stations. They each got to listening to the Bible story during the teaching time and also played fun games and participate in the craft and snack time.

The children loved playing with the parachute, but even better than the parachute was the attention the were given by all of the volunteers!

Yard Sale
As we’ve come across various needs or desires for our church such as putting up a sign to identify who we are and where we meet or renting a location to meet in outside of our home we have been confronted with the reality that we don’t have the income to support those types of purchases yet. So, several of the members of the church began to do fund-raisers like selling food after service and this last Saturday hold an all-church yard sale. It was a lot of work, but great fun. Almost everyone from the church came out to help and though they don’t have much materially everyone gave and made sacrifices for the good of the church. We got to meet and invite out so many of our neighbors to service the following day. Some people commented that they always saw the activity in our yard and house, but never knew that it was a church gathering. We hope to see these families again!

A New Canopy!

We are so blessed to have been given a new canopy (actually two that we’ve put end to end on our driveway) that have walls and doors and windows like a real building. It will allow us to continue using our home for our Sunday services – the adults outside and the children and babies inside – until we can find another larger building that will serve our growing congregation’s needs.

Prayer Requests

New Teammates. At the end of May we will be losing our two interns. It is amazing how fast a year can fly by and these two ladies have done amazing things, but now it is time to pray and ask God for wisdom, direction and help because they will be leaving a big hole in the Fuente team. Please pray for a good transition – especially since many of the children, youth and families have grown to love both Jessica and Monica.

Spiritual Growth. Continue to pray for us as we desire numerical growth AND the maturing of those that have recently come the Lord and for leaders to continue to emerge and mature from within our congregation.

A Building. With the amount of ministry going on and the number of adults, youth and children it has been hard to have everything in our home because of the lack of available space to hold all the people we have coming during our bigger events.


Thank you for being a pillar for us – holding us up high so that we can continue loving the unloved, serving the broken and bringing light to the dark!


Strong in Him,
Chad & Fabiola

Breaking Free

We recently returned from a powerful time of “Breaking Free” at the Winter Teen Retreat held at The OAKS Camp.  Our church, Fuente para las Naciones, took four boys and four girls.  We love camp because it provides fun, relational time in a place far from the distractions of home and the city, with a focus on the content of what Christ did for us. 

On the first night we watched a powerful drama about a man on death row.  At the end many of us were in tears as we saw Jesus take the hardened criminal’s place and receive the lethal injection.  Three of our youth responded to the call to get their lives right and make first time commitments to Jesus Christ – one youth was so in awe of what God has done for us that this youth could barely speak for the remainder of the night. 

Another key point brought out by the drama was the need to forgive.  The lady whose husband was shot in the play wasted three years of her life in bitterness and unforgiveness.  Many of our youth, while still in their early teens, have harbored deep and bitter wounds against parents and others – one of our youth in particular let it all go releasing the pain to Jesus and was noticeably set free. 

Besides those of us on the church plant team we had two other volunteers that came as counselors that were also impacted by the weekend as they saw God move on people’s lives first hand.  Both desire to be more involved in ministry, and this camp served to confirm that calling even more.  Pray for us in these next weeks as we continue to build off of what took place and encourage our youth to make their relationship with Jesus a priority.  Please also pray for those that were not yet ready to make a decision to give all to Jesus….that their time would come soon.

Please continue to cover us in prayer in these other important areas:

-We plan to open a new cell group Bible study with one of our newest leaders this month.  Pray that everything will go well and that through this group more people will be brought into the Kingdom, trained-up and released for service.

-Most of the members of our new church have recently been set free from their dark pasts and there is still a lot of smoothing of rough edges and refining that needs to be done.  Pray that we would continue to allow the Holy Spirit to sanctify us and unify us as a family that loves and cares for one another.  Pray for unity and that families would come out to worship and learn together.

Sincerely,

Chad & Fabiola