McKinney Report

  During the lockdown, the Mangabeira church ended up losing their meeting place. Going for a long time online, the brethren were starved for face-to-face fellowship. The Luna church of Christ invited them to meet with us until they could get back on their feet.  Each Sunday attendance is growing, maybe because more and more people are being vaccinated. Last Sunday was the largest this year: 83 present. We have ceased our online live transmission, a further encouragement for more to come in person.  

                                                                                                  by David McKinney As the Mangabeira and Luna are regrouping, the kingdom is expanding. For many years we have evangelized in the neighborhood called Esplanada. Several members from Luna live there, and we have desired to start a new congregation in this area of the city. Problematic brethren, family feuds and the pandemic are some of the reasons that kept us from moving forward. It was disappointing. However, this year, when it was least expected, things began to happen: we were offered a house to use for church meetings, more Christians (from another state) moved to this neighborhood, some people started taking initiative, etc. So I decided to give it a push and we started having Sunday services on the first of August. Please pray for the work in Esplanada!  

                                                                                                    by David McKinney       Beliza first met the church in 2009. Along with her came her little brother Kauã. He was two years old at the time. He has had the privilege of growing up in the church. This means that God has used many people to influence him in the process of his conversion.       He has participated avidly in Sunday School, VBS, tagged along with big sister to all kinds of youth devos and retreats, studied the Bible with Joseph and myself, and so forth.       Kauã is only thirteen years old, but has had a rough life. His mom died when he was little, his dad is distant. His dad remarried and his stepmother, unlike certain fairy tales, loved him as her own. However, she got cancer, was cured, then it came back and finally ended her life four years ago.       As we talked about him giving his life over to Jesus, I told him that something very new and different was about to happe

  These are our AME students. We are preparing these young people for mission work. When Joe McKinney, our father, came for a visit, we of course asked him to share his experiences of over forty years working as a missionary, minister, and elder with them.  He was worried at first that his mind wouldn’t remember things, but once he got started, he had stories, and more stories, that map out how to deal with the difficult situations in sharing the Good News with a lost world. The AME students learned a lot and loved him.

This year has been rough for Borges's family. They lost a pillar in their family, his wife's mother in February. Now her brother has passed, buried today. He was diagnosed with prostrate cancer 18 months ago. A policeman, used to taking care of the family, he had to settle with being taken care of by the family as his body gradually shut down when the cancer metastasized to his bones. Borges and Geilza have spent every free moment taking care of Demilson's needs, and it has been torture watching him slowly wear away. His colleagues in the Military Police carried his casket, played taps on a trumpet, presented his family with a Paraiba flag, and thanked his family for supporting him in defending society for nearly thirty years. It was a nice gesture, but the event that gives us believers hope in the face of death is Jesus winning over the grave. He is our certainty that a grave is not the end.

 Every Tuesday night for the last month we have been getting together to study God's Word. The subject is controversial but needed because it affects relationships and families in the church, and we as spiritual leaders will be more effective if we are united in teaching Jesus' will on marriage and divorce.  Just like Jesus, we want to go  back to beginning and uphold God's ideal when He created marriage:   “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Matthew 19:4-6