Friend Day is actually a day celebrated in Argentina. This Sunday Pastor Matías will be using this day to talk about the best friend anyone could ever have, Jesus! We are praying for the friends that have been invited to come to the service. Pray with us for God to work in the services of this special Sunday!

Lord willing, we will be in Louisiana sharing what the Lord is doing in the ministry with churches that have supported us since we were on deputation. We want to be a blessing to these churches, pray that God uses us!

Family Spotlight

We are blessed to be the parents of four amazing daughters! Our two oldest daughters were a part of “The World’s Cheapest Missions Trip”. At the end of the week long missions trip, both of our daughters each surrendered to be missionaries, if the Lord leads them that way. Each did so on her own. Both have a burden for India. They may have an opportunity to go on a missions trip to India in November! While we don’t know what the Lord has for them, as their parents we are so encouraged to see them respond to God’s working in their lives!

I have enjoyed reconnecting with churches that we haven’t been with since deputation. I was recently in one of those churches and I was greatly encouraged by what one of the men who spoke with me after the service. He remembered well when we were with them back in 2015 and he said to me, “You went and did exactly what you told us you were going to do!” That stuck with me, I have humbly thought about how good God has been, how He has blessed us and given us fruit in the ministry. I know it is God that does the work, and He deserves all of the glory. I cannot take any credit, it is really all about Jesus!

An effective missionary does what he has been sent to do. We are church planting missionaries, so we should plant churches. Other missionaries go out and do other things, and they too should do what they have been sent to do! That is an effective missionary! I can only speak to what God has led us to do. Planting churches means evangelizing, baptizing, discipling, and training men to continue the work, and hopefully help train a man who will one day pastor that church. But there is even more to planting churches. I remember our first months (even years) when we planted Faith Baptist Church. Nothing was set up, we rented a building, decorated it, designed the order of the services, printed tracts and invitations to pass out. Everything done in those months was done by us, every prayer, every invitation given out, every Bible message, every visit, and every discipleship session, all of it was done by us. Before long, the Lord started blessing. We saw a few people saved, and we started discipleship with a couple. People slowly started to respond. Today is a totally different story, Faith Baptist Church continues on. Matías is pastoring the church and doing a phenomenal job. The church now has her own building. There are a few things we need to fix and to improve, but the ministry is progressing. Young men are wanting to plant churches in surrounding cities in the southern zone of Buenos Aires. It is all very exciting! I share all of this to explain that “planting a church” is much more than just “planting a church”.

We need effective missionaries. Do what you have been sent to do! That doesn’t mean things will go smoothly, they probably won’t, but little by little, God will do His work and Jesus will build His church. Lord willing, we will go back to Argentina in January and start our second term. What will we do? We will do exactly what we have been sent to do, we will plant more churches and train more men to advance the Gospel! God will really be doing all the work, and by faith we believe God will use our meager efforts to reach the lost and work in them as He as worked in and through us! Effective missionaries do what they are sent to do.

Tomorrow, Faith Baptist Church will host a special ladies fellowship. Ayelen is going to be teaching the lesson. Brian and Ayelen are assisting missionary Stephen Underwood in the church that he and his family recently planted in Ezeiza. It is a blessing to hear how they are a blessing to both the Underwood family and this new church plant! Please pray for this special meeting. We have found that there are ladies who may not come to a traditional service, but will come to a ladies fellowship.

The ladies ministry at Faith Baptist Church has grown over the past year and we are praying that more ladies will be saved as a result of this special meeting!

Serving Together, 

Patrick, Leslie, Lily, Piper, Ivy, and Isla Henry

I started a series on an effective missionary last week. We all want to be “effective” to what the Lord has called each of us. Sometimes it is hard to know how. Today’s lesson on how to be an effective missionary is to report back to the churches that support you. The good news is that with the technology we have today missionaries can easily report back each month. I am blessed to have wonderful churches who have supported us for years. Most of them require a missionary letter once every three months. I recommend that you send a prayer letter every month. It doesn’t cost that much, it is very easy to do in comparison to missionaries who were on the field 50+ years ago, and it is a blessing to those churches that support you.

Send physical letters through the mail: Monthly prayer letters should be sent as a physical letter to the churches, and as a backup they can be sent via email. The reason for sending the prayer letter through the mail instead of only email is because in the future, the email address you have for a church may no longer be a valid email address. If it is the pastor’s email, he may get a new email address, God may lead him to a new ministry, or he may retire. The church will think you have stopped sending prayer letters altogether, even if you are consistently sending them. If you send monthly prayer letters through the mail, they will always receive your prayer letters.

Give details about your ministry in the prayer letters: Your prayer letters should include details about your ministry, specifically what happened the last month, and what is planned for the present month. Give specific details about what is going on, about specific people you are witnessing to, about steps of faith you are taking. It is a prayer letter, so give the readers specific requests to pray about!

Keep your prayer letters simple and easy to read: I am addressing the format of the letter. I was an assistant pastor at my sending church. At one time, Pastor Lawrence asked me to work in the missions ministry. We had stacks of prayer letters, many from missionaries we never supported, that would come in each month. Each prayer letter was different, for some of them it was hard to identify the missionary, the field, the contact information, and/or the support address. All of that information was on the prayer letter (well… most of the time the information was all there), but the layout was complicated. Make it clear and easy to read. At a glance, the reader should know who the missionary is, where he serves, and how to contact him.

Your prayer letter should fit on one piece of paper: Some churches like to display their missionaries’ prayer letters. When a missionary sends a two page letter, it makes it harder to display. Format your prayer letters so that they fit on one page (and on one side of one page).

Don’t preach in your prayer letter: This may be controversial and I don’t want to offend anyone, but I do think this is a valid point. Your prayer letter is supposed to update churches about your ministry and give them requests so that they can pray for you and those specific requests. Whenever I saw a prayer letter that started out with 2-3 Bible verses and included some sort of comments on the verses, I thought, “this is filler”. Missionary, save your teaching and preaching for the pulpit, use your prayer letters for updates and prayer requests.

Be honest and forthright: Don’t embellish what is going on in the ministry. Be totally honest. If you are on furlough, make that clear, the same whether you are on deputation or in language school. Don’t misrepresent anything. Be honest and be positive. Every ministry has problems. I can remember when I was in Bible College, at times, pastors would come in to preach chapel, and a running joke was, “The ministry would be easy if it weren’t for people.” It was just a joke, obviously the ministry is all about Jesus and about people. You can be honest, but you don’t have to sound like the world is ending and everything is horrible. Just like every ministry has problems, every ministry also has blessings! Share both, but focus on the blessings (that is a general rule for life, not just for prayer letters). Be clear with what stage you are in, I am on furlough right now, I am visiting churches, and the ministry is still continuing in Argentina. To put it bluntly, If you are on furlough, don’t make it sound like you are on the field.

Be consistent: Send a prayer letter every month. With technology today, a missionary can send their letter to the states from almost anywhere in the world. There may be some place deep in the jungle where a missionary cannot send correspondents, and if that is the case then it is completely understandable why they cannot send a prayer letter every month, but that is an exception, and not the rule.

An effective missionary sends prayer letters to churches every month. People want to know what is going on in your ministry, they have invested in you, they believe God is using you, let them know all about it!