Tag: 2018 Prayer Letters

Ministry

As I’m sure you have been made well aware 2018 has flown by, God has given yet another good year of serving Him. I can honestly say every day, and every year, gets sweeter with Jesus. We appreciate your prayers for us in this previous year, they were sincerely felt, and genuinely needed. I am certainly convinced that God has blessed us so tremendously, in no small part, because of your prayers.
Our church and its ministries have continued to grow, with us having hit a new high attendance of over sixty people; and more people coming to trust Christ as Savior. One interesting milestone we crossed in these past few months, is that we have now seen, in the second year of our church, people come from forty-three different countries. That is exciting, not only because it is a lot of countries, but because in six months we have surpassed our total for the entire first year.
Our soul winning ministry has also increased, with several more men joining me to go door knocking. We still go to the city thirty minutes to our south on Monday, each week, and were blessed to have our first visitor from there recently. We now have four more men who are starting to go on other days, boosting us to be able to go almost every day of the week. Four of the men who go with me, were some of the men baptized this past September, it is exciting to see them sharing the gospel with others. We will actually this week teaching soul winning classes at our church, so that others might start joining us.
I mentioned a building in my last letter, I have spoken with the owner; and seen the property. It is perfect for our needs and in a great location. The building is large enough for our church, for the foreseeable future, and has an apartment attached for our family. The price is very good for this part of the city, but still considerably out of our price range; it is nearly half the price of any building its size. Please pray for us though, we desperately need God’s guidance in whether this property is His will or not.

Ministry

God has been so good to us since our last letter, enough so that one letter can scarcely contain it all, nevertheless we will try. Since our last letter we had the privilege of seeing several saved here in our church. One of those were saved as part of a special service we were able to have with Dr. Roger Baker from our mission board. Dr. Baker was here for the first ever Macedonia World Baptist Missions European Retreat. We had not only the privilege of having him here at our church but also travelling with him to Germany and being a part of that meeting with our Macedonia family. Following on from the meeting with Dr. Baker, we were able to have our first baptism here at Gent Baptist Church. In September we were able to baptize 6 people here in our church: three Dutch men, a Filipino lady, and two Iranian men. I will attach to this letter pictures from the baptism, as well as from our Visitor’s Day service with Dr. Baker. The van that we previously mentioned having purchased, has already been put to excellent use, having been used every week to bring people to our church. Most Sundays we drive to the city of Eeklo and pick up a couple, and then a few people here in our city. I want to especially thank those who gave to help with the cost of this van, your gift is greatly appreciated. We have continued strong in our door knocking ministry and God has even blessed us with another man in the church who meets me on Mondays in the next city to the south of ours. Now we have the blessing of knocking doors in our city on Thursday nights and in Deinze on Mondays. Even more encouragingly though, God seems to have really broken down the barrier for us in this cause. We have suddenly seen a shift in receptiveness as we are having many opportunities to thoroughly share the gospel with people. Please keep us in your prayers as seems to be custom in our street preaching we have faced the same setbacks of the police trying to stop us. Another place we would request your prayers is that we have found a building we have begun praying about but if God wants us to have it, then it will require a few miracles from Him.

Ministry

We just finished our first year with the Gent Baptist Church and all I can say is praise the Lord. The church celebrated its one year anniversary on June 24th, 2018; where we had a very special service with about fifty people in attendance.   Our church worked hard and prayed hard for this day, giving out

10,000 invitations to the service. In Our first year we were able to give out about 50,000 gospel tracts here in Belgium. We were also able to reach a new high attendance of 55 by having a combined service with Lighthouse Baptist Church of Almere, NL. We have kept our street preaching going and added a door knocking time on Thursday evenings. In our church, we were able to preach the gospel to people from 42 different countries and from every inhabited continent. Our student Bible study that we added on Tuesday nights has continued to do well, even having one to come to trust Christ through this. We have also purchased a van in order to help with bringing people to church and for some of the basic needs of our family. With this comes several added costs that we had not previously anticipated. Please pray God will provide in this cause as we used money that is needed elsewhere and are just trusting that God will supply the need. The van is a standard seven passenger van, but because of our location; this is far more practical for the foreseeable future.

I had an incredibly unique opportunity today that I ask you to pray for as well. One of the larger theaters here contacted me about preaching the gospel in a production they are doing in honor of the religious history of our city. This would mean getting to stand on their stage and preach the gospel multiple times to people who have probably never heard. This is something we have only begun discussing, but even today it gave me an opportunity to preach to the crew who are organizing this program.

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