Several things happened in our church this month that I am very thankful for. Two brothers were baptized and joined our church. We accepted them to join us last month, and they officially signed the church covenant and joined this month. This is one blessing from God to our church. Another blessing was in a members meeting the brothers and sisters chose me and another brother to be elders. This was a sign of God’s calling on me and it encouraged me to serve God even better. This step also helped the church further along in our pursuit of being a biblical church.
I finished preaching through Titus this month and started Daniel. We especially looked at the three heroes who were faithful to death. They put us to shame who are living as children of God in the “Babylon” of China. This reminded me how I should live for God and how to fight for my faith.
This month I worked on learning Hebrew. In the hope that we will understand God’s Word better from the original language, the seminary here opened this class to some of us the alumni. Hebrew is really hard, but this time learning it was somewhat different. *We made some adjustments in the church this month. We started members’ small groups on Wednesday nights. The purpose for this is to better shepherd the members and also to cultivate better relationships between the brothers and sisters. We changed Thursday evenings to evangelistic meetings. We still have worship service Sunday mornings and we started doing adult Sunday School in the afternoons. After that we have a church prayer meeting. This way more people are able to participate in the prayer meeting.
The church is starting to experience some problems. There was a young man who applied to join the church, but we were seeing discrepancies in his life and faith. Because of this we decided to postpone his joining. Then he went out and slandered the church and me. This disturbed me. I am thankful though that we were able to deal with this situation Biblically. Please pray to us because with the numerical growth of the church there also will be an increase of problems.
This month we started a ministry for the families in the church. We have five families meet together to learn, grow, and encourage each other. We are learning how to be biblical husbands and wives and how to train our children. The whole group is fairly young so we need lots of exhortation and support.
Timothy began working for HeartCry in 2015 and assists with the work in Asia. He is married, has eight children, two sons-in-law, one daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.
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