Good Friday in Negritas

Our new church in Negritas, Mexico decided to have a Good Friday Outreach of their own. During their 10 Days of Prayer God led them to invite everyone town to eat elotes with them. Elotes (corn on the cob) is a special treat and much less expensive then a full meal. After eating they had a piñata for the children and then showed The Passion of the Christ on a big screen.

Four families came and everyone said they had a good time. God is blessing their efforts as a few people have come and privately asked Lupe and Leti if they would come and read the Bible with them in their homes. These are tremendous results as people in the small rural towns of Mexico are generally speaking very hard to reach. They are steeped in tradition and peer pressure is high to conform. Pray for this small group of believers who are courageously trying to shine Jesus' light and love to their home town.

Good Friday was Great!

Our Ten Days of Prayer were leading up to our Good Friday Outreach. Every year we serve a homemade meal prepared by ladies of our churches. After the meal we have a worship service that features a testimony from a couple in our church and an evangelistic message. Finally, we play basketball all night or until everyone goes home.

This year we had about 180 people in attendance. There were about 120 people who stayed for the worship service and there were 50 people in the children's program. We have never had so many people stay for the worship service before.


At the end of the worship service an invitation is given to pray to receive Jesus as Savior. This year a record 25 people indicated on response cards that they did.

Pray with us for efective follow-up. Five couples in our church will be contacting everyone who came by phone and with personal visits.

10 Days of Prayer

Each year before Good Friday our churches in Jefferson and Lebanon spend 10 days together, asking God to draw many people to himself during our Good Friday outreach. We write the names of as many pre-believers as we can think of on cards. Then we pray for them to come to Good Friday, to enjoy the meal and the worship service, and to eventually give their hearts to the Savior. During our prayer time we also spend time worshipping God in song, in reading scripture together, and in silence before Him. We always have great times together in God's presence and the 10 days of prayer is everyone's favorite time of year.

In these two churches we have very few believers but they have a heart for the lost and a strong belief that God answers prayer. In all we can identify only 25 believers in the two churches, including children. The low number is in part because we just sent 11 believers back to their town in Mexico to start a new church there (see our last post).

Each year we try to pray as many "man hours" as we can. One "man hour" of prayer is one person praying for one hour. That means that with only 25 believers, if we are going to pray 500 man hours of prayer each believer in the church would have to spend 20 hours in prayer during the ten days. In order to reach 1000 hours each believer would have to average 40 hours during the ten days. Adults work and the children go to school, so having any kind of high average is very difficult. Of course, we also have a few pre-believers spending some hours with us which helps reach a higher total. Well, we just finished and we were able to pray a total of 1625 hours! Praise God!

But that's not all! Our new church in Negritas, Mexico also had their own ten days of prayer. They wrote the names of every single person in their small town on cards and prayed for them to come to know Jesus. Only 11 believers managed over 1130 man hours of prayer. Now, THAT is commitment to prayer.

We are looking forward to seeing what God does!