This has been a pretty average week, and sometimes average is welcome. We have had our share of excitement in the past year and this is OK.
 I am spending a LOT of time in study in the book of Acts, probably 20 hours just this week. The book of Acts is so foundational that we plan to teach it wherever we go throughout this region. As we study through the book of Acts, we see a picture of the church that is so different from churches today. Our goal is to help recapture that spirit of the early church and get people to see that vision.
In June, we will begin teaching our BTCP classes, both in Bluefields, and in the surrounding areas. BTCP is the ten book curriculum that is designed for training pastors and lay leaders.
 We will be teaching it here in Bluefields, but we have churches in the outlying areas that need this training too, so we are setting up a schedule where we can take this training to them too.
Once each month, we will leave on Wednesday and go to Corn Island, teach Thurs - Sat, and then preach on Sunday and come back Sunday afternoon. We will do the same in Haulover also. This will have us in the outlying areas two weeks per month.
This requires travel and time away, but the only other alternative would be to try to bring all these leaders to Bluefields every month and feed and house them and that is much more difficult.
 Most of these churches outside of Bluefields do not have pastors, and many of them have not had pastors for several years. We want to help strengthen the churches in these areas and help build them up to self-sustaining churches.
The music classes continue to go well. The attendance fell off a bit in our morning class, but we have let the kids know that if they are serious, then they need to be there every time, on time.
We continue to meet with people here who we can assist in ministry. There is a small house church that has asked me to help teach them. We are excited about working with them because, in a very real sense, this is church in its earliest  simplest form, when you consider that church buildings did not even exist for the first 300 years of the church.
We also are still consulting with the guys from Monkey Point. They want help to get their farming started again and to get some type of church gathering started again. We have made it clear that our first objective is to strengthen churches, but that we will do what we can in other areas.
The man in this picture is Jim, a 80 year old man who is still working to help put together farming projects on the Atlantic Coast. We have offered to help however we can, helping to rewrite their grant proposals or build a website to help raise support for the farming project.
 Alfred is refinishing the doors to the house. The guy who made the doors left swirl sanding marks in the doors and told us there was nothing he could do about it, so we are sanding them all back down and putting a heavy coat of polyeurethane on them (they just had a thin lacquer coat on them).
I am also continuing on the cabinets, though study and teaching and preparation for the upcoming teaching is taking almost full time now.
We got good news that our stuff has shipped from Miami and we should have it all here around the middle of this next week. It will be good to have the new piano keyboards in our hands. We are running a little short right now with only three keyboards.
 Our music teacher's son Nehemiah is really enjoying working with the GarageBand program on the computer. He is a very good piano player and was laying down tracks in Reggae style music.
He is going to be coming back and working with this computer on a regular basis. We brought this here with the hope of finding a young person here who had the time and talent to work with this.
It will be really nice if he can start laying down backup tracks that churches can use in their worship.
Our spanish language training is going nicely. We are starting to read portions from the Bible in Spanish. Our teacher is very good and puts a lot of time into preparing the lessons so that they are well organized.
Last, and probably least, we made some improvements to the front page of our website. We put a Bluefields weather icon on it so that you can see what the temperature and weather is here.
You will notice it is frequently raining - the average rainfall is almost 200 inches per year. You will also notice that the temperature varies little from one day to the next.
We also put a Twitter blog thing on the lower right hand corner where we can drop one-line updates throughout the day (when we are not out of the region). Yeah, it is probably too much information, but then again someone might actually enjoy it.
If you have a hard time understanding what Twitter is about, you can check out this little article that we put up. The bottom line is that you can just scroll through the little updates when you are on our site.
We like to do everything that we can to stay in touch with you while we are here, so that you feel you are here with us.
This coming week we will be in Corn Island, Wednesday through Sunday, laying the groundwork with the pastors and churches for the classes there. We will try to get to an internet cafe periodically to put updates up, but we will probably not do the weekend update until Sunday of next week.
Thank you as always for your prayers.
God bless you,
Tim and Kim |
