House Church Seminar

This last weekend we had a seminar on house churches for our church family. Bryan and Jacqueline Bost, from São Paulo, led the seminar. They have been missionaries in Brazil for 31 years and have seen and done many wonderful things in their ministry.

They worked in São Paulo for 20 years and Manuas for 5 years doing what we did in the beginning of our ministry here: having different ministries and activities to attract people to a strategically located building. For the past 6 years they have been back in São Paulo working with house churches.

When they returned to São Paulo in 2001 they had made the decision to work with house churches, without recruiting any other Christians to help them. For 2 months it was just Bryan and Jacqueline - staring at each other! Today, there are so many house churches and Christians participating in the house churches that they don't have any kind of a count. They have no idea how many disciples of Jesus have become involved! That is awesome!

We asked Bryan and Jacqueline to come to Porto Alegre to share their experiences and their stories with us. We wanted our church family to be encouraged by what the Lord has done with house churches in São Paulo and what he can do with house churches in Porto Alegre; Brazil; and the rest of the world. In total, we had 10 hours of listening to and interacting with this wonderful couple. Many of our members were able to participate and have walked away with more vision for what is possible.

I think the most important thing we learned is to pray constantly and to be faithful disciples of Christ. God will do the rest!

The 2 pictures above are from part of the seminar on Sunday morning.

The 2 pictures below are from our worship service that took place Sunday afternoon. You can literally have church anywhere - we met in a bowling alley!