August 8, 2007

Dear Brethren,

This month I made only one trip out of town. I visited Bible Baptist Church on the Pentecoste River. Now that it is dry season I am able to get there by road. In the rainy season this would be an all day trip, one way. This time I went on my motorcycle and took less than two hours. They asked me to help in a series of lessons about the Holy Spirit. They are in a nice new brick building and it was packed every night (over 250).

Things have been very busy at First Baptist. Even though it is summer time and attendance is usually lower, this year we have held our own. We were down just a little in June. We continue to hover around 400 in Sunday School and 300 for the afternoon service. At night time we continue to be standing room only. Much of my time has been taken over the past month remodeling our building and working on the new Sunday School annex. This latter is going to be a long process since it is very big, three stories tall. We are now working on part of the middle section so that we can put our baptistery, dressing rooms and new restrooms back there. This will free up room in our auditorium for about 200 more seats. Anyway we continue to grow slowly. We had five professions of faith three weeks ago, one more two weeks back and three more last week.

One weekend we held a two-day bake sale and games for the kids to raise some extra money for the remodel. This brought in over $2,000. We had over 1500 people for services that Sunday night. Then on the last Sunday in July we had a special offering, which ended up being an all time record for our church: just under $20,000! Unfortunately it won’t go far with a bag of cement costing $17.00. Still we are proud of our folks and the way the Lord has blessed them.

We have also had a couples retreat. Eleven couples from our daughter church in Rio Branco came in to be with us. The church we organized there in the capital is Memorial Baptist Church and her Pastor Marcos was our teacher.

Our school had a two-day fair about five weeks ago. We used this to help out on the construction there. That is one of the three projects I told you I have been working on. I have pretty much done all I can there for now.

I concluded the third building project I had been working on. We built two studio apartments for Pastor Dauro (my son-in-law), Crissy and Caleb to live in. In the future, after they build their own house, these apartments will be for our missionaries and other visitors to stay in. They moved in a few weeks ago. They are also expecting their second child. Dauro gave up his accounting business to go full time in the ministry in January. The church pays him about $750.00 a month. I admire his courage and great faith in God to take care of his young family.

Well, even though I have been working an average of 15 hours a day, I didn't have much to report to you this month. Hopefully I'll do better next month. Keep praying for us. Thanks for being so faithful in your support.

In Christ,

Mike Creiglow