Helping Rewrite Stories

Every community has its own story. Every individual has a unique narrative. As we partner together to share God’s heart for redeeming broken people amongst the urban poor we hope that you will be able to ‘walk’ the streets with us and ‘visit’ the homes and get to ‘hear’ these stories. So often we are confronted with negative stories – our hope is to help people, and entire communities, rewrite their stories…to the kind of story that has a happy ending. The kind of story where the protagonist rises from the dead to rescue the broken hearted and wandering! The kind of story where we aren’t the main character, but we still play a very important part….

UPDATES

Women’s Breakfast

A team of women from our church organized a special breakfast for the women. There was a powerful time in the Word of God and fellowship. Women were able to open up about past hurts that they have been carrying and receive prayer, counsel and the support of other women. 

South Park Opens Field

This is worth reporting because it is a big deal for our community. A new synthetic soccer field was just installed and opened up and it is right across the street from our church. Now even more people pass by our church and come – we anticipate different types of outreach and service opportunities in the near future. 

VBS

The week leading up to Easter as the children in the community are on Spring Break we have a yearly tradition to go out and hold a Vacation Bible Study (VBS) for the community. This year we had around 100 people participate. We are so grateful for a high school group that volunteers along with our church to help make this possible. Our relationship with the community continues to improve as we invest in children, families and in meeting real needs. 

We share a Bible story every day, sing lots of fun Bible songs, have craft and game times, and snacks too, of course. The thing that gets us every time is how significant these things are to the kids and their parents. They just don’t have these experiences or this type of attention available to them. We get to see lots of smiles and have opportunities to share the gospel one-on-one with parents as well as from the stage. 

Another thing that encourages and inspires us each year is the blessing and benefit these events are for the volunteers that come from outside of the city.  Below are some excerpts from things they shared about their week with us:

"LA was honestly not at all what I had anticipated. It was far from the beautiful sunshine portrayed from Hollywood. It was dark and dreary, hopeless and consuming. Walking through the week, there were definitely struggles I'd never forget….”

"Today was our last day in LA and I realized how much I was going to miss the kids at the VBS. Each of the kids has taught me something priceless and I learned so much from watching them interact. By holding our VBS, we brought the Spanish side of the park and the Black side of the park together. By watching them play soccer, sing songs, and draw on my face together, I learned so much about love and my faith…."

“I think the thing that surprised me the most was how much culture shock I experienced. I walked into a completely different world that existed in my own backyard. Even down to the way people spoke. I thought I knew LA like the back of my hand but the second I got here, I saw new places and people I hadn't known ever existed….Even one of my favorite places in the world, I knew so little about it.” 

“I made it my goal to try to get to know at least one kid. I ended up sitting next to this girl named Niyeli.

We started off with small talk questions like:

"What do you like to do for fun?" (Basketball) or

"What's your favorite subject in school?" (Math).

Super basic questions, but as I kept talking with her, the answers got deeper. She got more into the conversation. (And so did I) At some point, I asked her, "What else do you like doing at school? Do you hang out with your friends a lot?"...She shook her head, "I don't got no friends."

I didn't really know how to respond to this, I just held my urge to yell "I'LL BE YOUR FRIEND!!!" because I knew it would be impossible to keep in contact with her after this week.

I asked her if she'd come back tomorrow to VBS….she said, "Yah! I'm always in this park! Ya know, ima grow up in this park. This is my place."

Work Projects

With the help of expertise from our church and two groups of volunteers we have been able to remodel our office (that use to be a storage room) with a new window, flooring, paint and shelving. We also redid the flooring in one bathroom where there was termite damage, built a fence, installed a new closet, painted the youth room and created a new solution for storage. Phew! The church is looking better than ever…and after each other of these projects becomes more and more useful to be able to serve even more people.   

Good Friday Service and Youth Group Unity

Our Good Friday service was special because we had people from the community and VBS that came out, had some of the youth from another church join us and just had a sweet time reflecting on what Christ has done for us. One of our past youth leaders returned with a group of teens from the church where he is currently serving for a mission’s trip experience. During the week, we did outreach together in the park (focused on the teens and tweens) and then went over to the homes of one of the families from our church for dinner, fellowship and a time of worship. 

Eater Service

The highlight of our Easter service was that 7 people were baptized. The baptisms are exciting in themselves, but it was the powerful words of encouragement, exhortation and prayers offered by our church over each individual that really impacted us the most. Also, these were not people that we led to the Lord directly, but friends and family that had been invited by people from our church that we had led to the Lord – in other words we were celebrating the baptisms of our spiritual grandchildren….pretty exciting! 

Conference: Activating and Releasing Believers

We are so thankful for our good friends that came and spent a week with us and spurred us on through practical service projects, deep fellowship and a conference that tops, I think, all conferences that we have ever had. The teaching was practical and powerful…and then we released people to pray and share. It is common for people to not want to pray or share in front of others…but that changed! By the end of the conference people were praying for one another, laying down burdens and sharing with stories of how God spoke to them and was healing their hurts and pains. 

Pulse: Church Planting and Leadership Conference

Chad was invited to teach a workshop at World Impact’s church planting and leadership conference, Pulse. The focus of the conference is to equip and empower urban leaders and those wanting to make a deeper impact in urban ministry. Chad shared strategies, principles and vision for church planting in the city. It was exciting being able to hand off some of that information and inspiration with the hopes to see more and more people impact their cities for Christ.

Outreach: Providing a Meal and Clothes

Creating a time and place to bring people together and meeting needs…that was what one of our latest outreaches was all about. We thank our friends for bringing food and other donations of clothes and toys that we can distribute to people in this community. We shared a meal together which allowed for families to sit down with their guests and share the gospel and a bit of life with them. 

Mother’s Day “Pampering” Event

We showered love and appreciation on the women for mother’s day. We are so grateful for the volunteers that came out and helped organize this event – all amazing people! There was a lot of great conversation and many first time guests. The children were cared for and having a blast playing games and making special Mother’s Day crafts and cards. Fabiola spoke to the women about the need and beauty of being vulnerable and then they had manicures and pedicures and a time for socializing and tea. Later they had a catered lunch and a special dessert.  Each lady left with a gift bag of goodies and words of affirmation spoken over them. 

 Three generations.

 Mother and daughters photo

Small Group Ministry

We have seen some great fruit coming out of the small group ministry at our church. Not only are new leaders being trained up and empowered to teach and lead others, but new people are coming to know the Lord.

One of our groups celebrated a ‘first’ in our church. They celebrated their one-year anniversary. This is the first group (not led by us) to have arrived at that benchmark. We had a nice time celebrating with worship and food and prayed for the harvest (above and below). Several neighbors came and joined us and shared needs in their lives, which this group will be following up with in practical ways.

Our newest group (below) decided to meet on May 10^th (the day most Mexicans celebrate as ‘Mother’s Day’) – after our study we had a nice cake and shared stories. Several of the women have recently given their life to Jesus!

Coming up:

Church camping trip                               May 20-21

New members presented                        May 29

Quinceaños celebration (15^th birthday)     June 4

Rebecca’s 5^th grade culmination             June 8

Evangel Church Planting School              June 9-11

Youth leadership transition                     June 17

Father’s Day celebration/service             June 19

Children’s church teacher training           June 25

Summer camps begin                             June 26

Wedding at our church                            July 23

Please Pray with Us…

1.      Stamina and Family Time.

Pray for stamina for our family and good family time outside of the ministry.

We are praying about where and how to get some administrative help for the church/ministry to allow us to continue pursuing the training-up and mentoring of leaders that are moving into bigger responsibilities and roles. 

2.      Healthy/Successful Youth Leaders Transition.

Pray that the upcoming transition in our youth ministry leadership will go well.

The couple that has been serving as our youth leaders are moving to another city. A couple in our church has the heart and feels called to take the baton and run with it, but it will require some good coaching and mentoring on our part as they have never led a ministry before. 

3.      Growth.

Pray with us about the growth and expansion of the church.

Over the last 2 months we have seen an increase in new families attending our services! Pray with us that we could help them assimilate into the life of the church and do a good job teaching and training them. We continue to look and pray for opportunities to move towards another church plant.

God does the work, but He loves to use each one of us in the process.

Thank you for partnering with us to help rewrite the stories of countless individuals. 

Chad, Fabiola, Rebecca, Justice and Beniah