Greetings from Montepuez!
We hope you are doing well and trusting in the Very Real
Hope that we have because of Jesus’ Resurrection and Victory over death. Nothing can touch that, and because of that
there is always joy.
We have been busy since our last newsletter – I am still
trying to figure out what happened to September and October??? We spent July and August wrapping up the
internship, sending off interns, continuing to study with village churches, hosting
deacons’ meetings, becoming parents of a teenager (!!!), and preparations for
the Bible School (developing curriculum and constructing temporary dormitories).
Then September began and we all hit the ground running! We were delighted to receive our teammates Rose
Perry and the Smith family back from their furloughs and cook them lots of
meals while they unpacked, recovered from jetlag, and got settled. And right away the Bible School opened the
first week of September with our teammate Chad Westerholm teaching the
inaugural course on the book of Mark. The
goal is to provide more advanced training for Makua-Metto church leaders; so far
our team has offered four different classes:
three different formats in two different locations for a total of six courses.
With the coming of the rainy season,
the last class finishes up next week; after that we will sit down with
different church leaders to evaluate this first year and discuss improvements
for 2017. Though it has been a steep learning
curve (especially in regards to housing and feeding the students), it has been
exciting to see how hungry they are to learn.
Adding up the number of students in each class there have been 84 total
course completions: this is made up of about 45 different students from six
different denominations. Please pray for
us as we begin planning for next year that the school will be a catalyst for
further church growth.
In late September, our team hosted 22 students and faculty
from the HIZ program (Harding-in-Zambia) for a short visit. We spent four days giving them a glimpse of
what life and ministry is like in rural Mozambique; they accompanied us to Bible
study groups in remote villages, worshipped with us in village churches, and
took tours of our local hospital and high school with our friends in the Peace
Corps. Our team has never hosted an
international group of that size, and it was a crazy four days, but it went
really well and we hope we can recruit them some of them to return to Mozambique
in some form or fashion!
Immediately after the HIZ group left we hosted a conference
for Churches of Christ in Cabo Delgado on our team’s land. The local church leaders completely organized
and led the three-day conference, but since it was held on our land, we were
kept especially busy (=exhausted!) ensuring various behind-the-scenes tasks ran
smoothly. About 250 people came from 5
different districts, including some visitors from other parts of
Mozambique. Cambama, Alegria, Pinto,
Goncalves, Napoleão, Chad, Jeremy, and Alan taught sessions on the theme of how
to strengthen the church.
The only sad element from the conference was that the
divisive church leader who has caused so many problems turned in letters again to
the government to try to shut down this gathering. These complaints meant that throughout the
conference there were several impromptu meetings behind the scenes as local church
leaders and church leaders from another province tried meeting with him
repeatedly to get him to repent. Unfortunately,
he seems bent on continuing down this divisive path, and his false accusations
have provoked even more meetings with officials to get to the bottom of the
problem. We have pleaded our case and have
turned in additional documents, and we are still waiting to be cleared of these
accusations. Please keep this matter in
your prayers since there are three residence visas on the team up for renewal
this week. The local church leaders from
Cabo Delgado continue to show a depth of maturity and patience in this
situation that gives us great hope for the future – please pray for their
endurance in this situation as well.
Because of the low levels of literacy in this area, over the
years we’ve experimented with a variety of methods to share audio files on a
large scale with church members (from MP3 players to iPod shuffles to solar
powered players to hand-crank radios – all with your generous help). All of these have gone well (though some
better than others), but they eventually wear out, and the technology continues
to improve – even way out in the bush. Since
cell phones are everywhere now, even in the most remote villages, Alan’s most
recent project along these lines involved formatting 120 mini-SD cards with recordings
of songs, scriptures, dialogues and sermons in Makua-Metto, and it has been fun
to hear our friends listen to the programs on their phones. One of the first people to receive one of
these cards, Pedro from Nekwaia, called Alan a week later to say that he had
sat down with his neighbor and had listened to ALL the Nviriyane dialogues
already – about 40 hours of programs walking through the core stories from
Scripture in Makua-Metto.
My study time with women’s groups has continued over the
past few months in six different rural locations as well as the weekly study
here in Montepuez. We’ve spent most of
our time studying different passages from the book of John, and in a few weeks
we will wrap up with a women’s retreat-event before the rainy season when many
people move out to their farms for the months of January and February. Tomorrow I’m heading out for three days with
my teammate Martha to visit, worship, and study with women in two locations in
the Namunu district.
Our weather is warming up and the earliest of the mangoes have
ripened, which of course we’re all excited about. My girls are longing to play in the rain and
I’m ready for the rain to wash away all the dust, but so far we’ve only had
sprinkles. The kids love having Miss Rose
back from furlough, and Miss Jessica (our new teacher returning intern Jessica) has been a big hit. Ellie is
days away from turning eleven, and we are planning a big Thanksgiving party
since we are so far away from our families.
We miss you all!
Please join us in praying for:
·
the upcoming rainy season to produce healthy
crops
·
perseverance for church leaders and continued
growth
·
final approval and stamps on all our residence
documents
Grace and Peace,
Rachel, Alan and the girls
