There is a new neighborhood growing nearby in Matagalpa. It is on government petitioned property (meaning people who couldn’t afford land asked the gov. for property), and made up of very poor families. This is the area where we visited the school with the college group from Edmond in May and gave away school supplies and did skits.

Homes made of plastic are the norm in Lucia Mantia

In July, Santos, a member of the church who lives in this neighborhood started reaching out to the youth of the area through boxing lessons. Many of them starting coming to church on Sunday mornings and David starting visiting them to have Bible studies.

Brother Santos

During the month of July, David was in charge of teaching Sunday Bible class, and he focused on the works of the church and our responsibilities as Christians, mainly evangelism and outreach. The members began to brainstorm and decided they wanted to meet every Saturday morning to work. We started with six groups of three. Half evangelized in Lucia Mantia, and half visited members. After a few weeks they decided to focus on Lucia Mantia, and we spent several Saturdays evangelizing and inviting families to services.

Evangelistic Team

Last week we decided we needed to give something to the community, so we held a kids class. The men asked me to prepare for 15-20 kids. When we arrived many of the members kept wanting me to go with them to invite kids (no one knew we were going to have class in the community), but I was hesitant. They were worried about too few kids, and I was worried about too many! We ended up with over 80 kids who learned about creation - how special we are, how God cares for us, and how we need to care for His creation. We also did several crafts, including an activity sheet for the days of creation (full of stickers, glitter and drawing), drawing the garden of Eden, making star cereal necklaces, dolls for the creation of humans, and leaf imprints on paper with crayons. Needless to say it was a loaves and fishes situation!!

Star necklaces

Carmen passing out activities

We look forward to being able to do more work in this neighborhood!

As you all know, one of our reasons to move to the northern part of Nicaragua was to work together with the preachers and congregations in this region. As a part of that work, we have begun this year organizing and participating in joint evangelistic efforts in each of the congregations. This year we started in San Jose de Bocay and El Cual with 5 baptisms, Apanas with 12 baptisms, and this month in La Dalia where we had two baptisms and like in every place, we left many good Bible study contacts for the local preacher to work with and hopefully convert.

We had 15 people (preachers, wives, and students) working in this month’s evangelistic effort. We had four nights of gospel meetings and four days of door knocking. It’s a shame that time limits us to only work in one small part of the town. But, we are prayerful that many of town’s people will have heard of the work we did and of the presence of the church there. The unique situation of this congregation is that several years back, they had baptized several people, but for one reason or another they all left. So, we were basically establishing the church.

La Dalia is a small town about an hour and a half north of Matagalpa. The town serves as a commercial hub that connects a bunch of smaller towns further out in the mountains and farms with the bigger city of Matagalpa. There’s a lot of movement and as a consequence people take up residence for a short while and then move on, which was one of the reasons why some of the members are not there any more. The other being that there was not a full-time preacher there up until a few months ago. Rene Rocha with his wife and child, moved there to begin working full-time trying to recuperate the old members and make new ones. This month’s evangelistic effort really gave him a boost, for him personally and for the work.

This was also my first time to preach during a gospel meeting. In Latin American countries, there’s a big difference between preaching in a regular service and preaching in a gospel meeting. A typical gospel meeting usually requires preachers that are very loud and long winded. So, this was a new experience for me because I am neither loud nor long winded. Maybe I just need more practice at it. It was a fun experience though and I hope to be able to do it again.