Alagoinha - Whole Heartedly

On a bright and beautiful Sunday afternoon, I travelled to Alagoinha, about one hour and thirty minutes from João Pessoa to meet with the church and teach on worshipping God through our finances. Instead of the usual sermon, I taught more of a Sunday School class type lesson on how Jesus, the apostles and the early church dealt with money.

Most of the Christians in Paraíba either came from the Catholic or denominational doctrine of tithing and free will offerings. Yes, the Catholic church does tithe now. Free will offerings are seen as giving the left overs. Completely different from what the Bible teaches. So how do most Christians give to the work of the church here in Paraíba? They usually fall under one of the two categories that I described above. Can you guess which one most of them fall into? I bet you can. Why is it that Jesus, the apostles and the early church dealt so much with the money topic? I think it must have been a problem then, too.

I have taught quite a bit about this subject over the past two and a half years. The truth of God's Word is sinking in the lives of some brothers. It is satisfying to be a part of moving someone closer to God and away from the World. We are all still learning but the journey itself is exciting. We are on our way to meet God face to face.

I was asked to teach this same course at ELICAMP (a leaders retreat for the congregations of the northeast of Brazil).

Please pray:

that the Lord's church in Brazil will live contently with what God has given each member
that each member will live the truth in our Lord's Words "It is more blessed to give than to receive." - Acts 20:35
that each member will give themselves "whole heartedly" first to the Lord.

Comments

Our Women: Shining Stars in the Universe

Unity Through The Word

Thank you all for your prayers for the PORMISSOES meeting last month. It was a great blessing. We sat and studied God's Word together for the entire day. There were some differences of understanding on some passages, but we worked our way through them. In the end, everyone was saying how the meeting was edifying. It started around 9:30 am. We broke for lunch at 1 pm. We started back around 2:30 and went until 6 pm. They wanted to keep going, but the SEARA class started at 7 pm. If every meeting could be as encouraging as this one, we would be in heaven. My goal with these meetings is to teach the church workers throughout the state how to listen to someone who has a different belief about God's Word, try to understand their logic, their thought processes and share their own understanding from the Bible. My hope is that God's Word is heard above their personal wants, desires, or traditions. This is no

Sharing Jesus in Mexico

by Renato Menezes Renato is the second young person from João Pessoa to go through the Adventures in Missions program. His 18 months is Mexico is about to end, and undoubtedly he has grown tremendously in his faith during these past two years. Here is his report on his personal Bible studies: Praise God I started studying the Bible with one more person since last month, raising the number of weekly Bible studies to four. Ema is one of the main people that work at the orphanage where we have a ministry (the children from there call her mother). She would visit the church before, but stopped because of work and other things, but in the last months, she not only started coming again, but brought her daughter too. Some Sundays ago I offered a Bible study, and she accepted happily (I was happy too). So then Ramiro and I began to meet weekly with her to study the book of John. We talked about the importance of baptism and about whether her baptism was Bib

McKinney Report

Search This Blog