During the month of April several new families began coming to our church, all of them from contexts of a false Christianity (one of them is the son of an “Apostle” in a prosperity church!). Also, several people have written us on the internet, some of them asking for help to plant churches, others asking a wide range of counseling questions, and others asking with urgency how they can be saved. All of these people that come to our church and that contact us, being more in number than normal, moved us deeply and reenforced our uneasiness with regard to the sense of needing to do more than what we are currently doing amidst the spiritual awakening God is giving to Argentina.
One day this month I began to count all the groups that have asked for help in planting churches since we began our church plant here in Rosario (some six years), and with a quick count I could calculate about 20. Nonetheless, for various reasons, we have not been able to collaborate with any of these groups. There is more we must do, though we don’t know what or how. We are praying to the Lord that He might show us what His will is, and that He would give us missionaries that we can send out.
On the other hand, I would like to share with you that during the month of April we made several decisions that quickly and very evidently proved to be bearing fruit. The first and most important is that we began to teach several brothers and sisters in our church how to teach expositionally. These were people that carry out roles and responsibilities in the care of other members [such as discipleship]. This has been an excellent step and several of them have proven to have great ability in this work.
Also, we decided to begin small groups with both men and women from our congregation in order to devote ourselves to prayer, discipleship, pastoral oversight, and also as a way of integrating newer members into the life of the church. In addition to this, we will eventually make these groups evangelistic Bible studies to which members can invite unbelievers that they have contact with.
Lastly, we decided to add a Sunday evening service in which we are offering the church a four-year seminary on the basics of Christian doctrine and ethics as well as a few more advanced topics. All of these decisions have opened up possibilities for the development of our church and they have been an immediate injection of sanctification.
I would also like to mention that I have been called upon to preach in a very populated rehabilitation center for drug addicts in our city. They have opened the doors to us and I have been able to begin a good relationship with the man that’s in charge of the center. This is a great opportunity, since it’s possible that we will have the ability to preach in the center as often as we would like, and because there is a huge number of men that circulate the center, thousands according to the man that is in charge. In two weeks I will have the opportunity to preach there for the first time.
Please, I ask you to pray for all of the things that come to mind from this report, since the course our church takes will depend largely on how we confront and develop all of these different situations that I have described.
In the deep love of Jesus Christ, from the missionary field,
Nicolás Serrano
