In September, I was so happy to hire Pastor Rama again to help with the church and radio. He worked for me in the past, but he went to Tanzania for a few years to teach in a Bible college there. Now he is helping to plan different activities for the church and take care of basic business things. He also started writing a monthly “info-sheet” for the church that lists the upcoming activities, a short Bible message, and a few jokes and cartoons. I really am so surprised at how happy this simple thing has made the Christians each month. One dear lady said, “I like it! It shows we are doing something and pushes me to come.” Little things are important!
Rama is also calling all our visitors every week to witness to them and push them to come again to church. He is doing well, and our average attendance has gone up 30 people to 90 now. But he always tells me that many visitors do not come back because we don’t dance! Rwanda is really filled with false teachings and false churches. He is also preaching on the radio five days a week and getting some visitors to church that way.
In October, we had a program called “Send the Light.” Each Sunday we had some special activities. Breakfast Sunday really kicked off the October program. On Family-Photo Sunday, every family got a free 5×7 picture. Popcorn-Preaching Sunday was great, with 7 of our guys preaching, and we had popcorn afterwards. We had about 60 children for our Kids’ Sunday, which had bag races, 3-legged races, and a water-balloon toss.
I think the most fun was having a goat to give away to the winner who brought the most visitors. The only problem was that on the last Sunday, the goat was tied outside, and all during the preaching, it went “Bahhh” continuously. We had 12 saved and 2 baptized during the program, with more planning to bring their families to watch them get baptized later.
I have also been trying to spend extra time with my assistant pastors to help them mature in the ministry. They have good doctrine, but other things need some help, like organizing Christians to help in the church, maintaining records, having a variety of preaching topics, having a budget, doing a financial report, making a yearly goal calendar, creating a monthly calendar, and planning a daily schedule to make it all happen. Like Dr. Jack Hyles taught us to do—make a schedule; then let the schedule be your boss.
Thank you all so much for your prayers and support. These 2 months we saw 46 people trust Christ out soul winning, 15 professions, 4 baptisms, and 62 saved through the radio.
In His service,
Gregg, Angela, Caleb, Hannah, Timothy,
Virginia, Micah, and Zachery Schoof