Out of the building! and moving on...

Sorry it has been so long since my last update on this blog. A lot has been happening with our transition into house churches and with our annual Brazilian Missionary Conference.

December 17th was our last Sunday in the building that had been our church family's "home" for just over 3 years. The week before Christmas (December 18th through 22nd) we spent a lot of time packing up the building and preparing for the move out. On the 26th of December the moving truck came and hauled almost everything to a storage facility. For the time being all of our chairs, desks, tables, office supplies, shelves, books, cabinets, etc. will be housed in this storage facility.

The 24th (Christmas Eve) was the first Sunday that we spent at the Blume's house for worship. We have been meeting in their backyard every Sunday since. We are currently looking for a house to buy and set up as our "Resource Center". We hope that this will be a place where our church family will come and fellowship throughout the week. This will be a place where the children can have an after school Bible study program, the men can have churrascos (bbq), the ladies can have fellowship and studies, and the youth can have devotionals. We hope that this will be a place where we can set up offices and have Bible studies and leadership training. Really, the list of what we can potentially do with this "Resource Center" goes on and on.

Our Sundays have changed a little bit. Of course, we are meeting in the Blume's backyard now. In addition, we are meeting at 9:30 in the morning instead of 6:30 in the evening. We are spending more time in fellowship and our class time involves us moving into a time with what will be our house churches. We currently have 4 groups that will transition into house churches.

So, right now we are meeting as a whole every Sunday. In the future, we will meet in our house churches every week in their designated locations. Once a month or so we will get together as a large Christian family at a hotel conference room or a school in order to worship and fellowship together. In two weeks we will have a huge (in our terms "huge") celebration at a park in a town near Porto Alegre. We ask you to pray about this celebration and the encouragement that we hope it brings to our Christian family in the Porto Alegre area. We also ask you to pray that our ministries and our house churches would thrive as we focus on reaching out to the "not-yet Christians" of our city.