November 1, 2003

Hi from Brazil,

Here it is easy to lose track of time. It seems as though I just finished last month's letter and here I am writing again. I hope with these letters you feel much closer to our work and more informed. Speaking of time, our time changed this month and I figure yours did too. We are now 3 hours ahead of those of you who live in Lexington and the rest of you can figure out the difference from that information.

This month has been a full one for the Church. Here in Brazil we celebrate Children's Day in October. We had a big day at Church and our bus brought 71 children from the surrounding neighborhoods. The vans brought more and our total was a record breaking 163. Praise the Lord for this. We also have had baptism this month with 10 candidates. One couple was my dentist and his wife, and I mention this because we have been diligently working with his whole family. His brother came to the baptism and we were all thankful because he is very cold toward Christ. I recently visited him and witnessed to him, his response was "I am not ready to let this Lord into my life". The reason that I was visiting him was because he had suffered an almost fatal accident. Please pray for this young family man to come to the saving knowledge of our Lord and Savior. 

Something different about our baptism, the 10 candidates were all adults. This is not the norm for Brazil, generally the children are converted first and then they bring their parents to Church.

Our door to door visitation is progressing very good. We are seeing a lot of fruits of these visits on Sunday as we are having lots of visitors. Almost every Sunday now we are setting a new attendance record, The past 4 weeks have been like this: 137-149-150-163 this is our Sunday morning services. We have re-organized our Sunday School classes and have had a week long training session for the teachers. We are now ready to burst at the seams.

Approximately 6 weeks ago we had a discipleship training class and we had 29 church members present. What an AWESOME blessing. Here is where we will be making the difference in our Church membership. Seeing them accept Christ and then training them in the Gospel. Barbara and I are doing a discipleship training with one new couple and I am starting another with another couple. What is really AWESOME about our discipleship program is that we are seeing our young people disciplining other young people. By the way our Saturday night Young people's meeting is averaging about 50 per night.

After much looking we have found what we think is THE property for the Vocational School. As always the main thing is the need for money to purchase the property. Pray with us that through you God will meet that need and we can begin the training of these young men. We are doing some training here in our home but we need a more structured training and a place that is just for the school. We have the two boys and are expecting two or three more by the first of the year. So you can see the urgency of this request. We want the foundation of our work to be our relationship with the Lord and Savior and this can be accomplished through PRAYER. So pray with us!!!

We have a personal prayer request: Barbara is having some problem with her left arm and is having to go to therapy. Pray that this will pass and she will be back to normal.

Our missions are also growing and are in need of chairs, benches, or pews. That all depends on what we can produce. These are growing pains that are good, but with growth comes more needs. We are doing what we can with the financial resources available. But the people of Brazil don't have the financial affluence that we have in the States so things come more slowly.

Keep us always in your prayers and remember especially the young men we will be training.

In His service,

AJ and Barb

Stephany, left, and Barbara, back, with a happy group of young people.

A.J. working with boys in woodshop.