Almost thirty years ago

Almost thirty years ago, we lived in the Philippines with no internet or cell phone.  Mail took twenty days - ten to America and ten more days for a response.  If we wanted to make a phone call, we had to take a two-hour bus ride to the city, wait 30 minutes, pay several dollars, and go into a booth.  So, talking to two of our pastors in Mozambique this morning, using an app, and paying nothing, still amazes us.

After spending nine years in Africa, we are getting settled in the States.  We now live in Redding, California.  If any of you are in the area, please come for a visit!  Grandma has moved in with us now.  As many of you know, Lorena’s mom needed more attention than she was receiving at her independent living center.  She is almost 95 and we felt it was important for us to temporarily leave the mission field to help her for a couple of years.  We are also helping our teenage boys, Caleb and Nate, transition into American life before heading back to the mission field.

Weekly leadership training seminars continue in Central Mozambique as we continue to organize and monitor them from here via regular internet phone calls and fellow team members… We are excited to report the printing of 2,000 more discipleship books just this week.  This time they were made in Blantyre, Malawi, where the quality is better and at a lower price.  Please pray that the documents we have will be sufficient to get the books across the border!  (Often this is where corruption takes place, making up “fees” with no receipts.)  Most mornings we spend speaking to our Mozambican leaders.  We are so thankful for smartphones!  For a few cents, Mozambicans can go online for one hour and communicate with us via WhatsApp, Messenger, and email.  After each seminar they send us videos, photos, and written reports, so we are always in touch and able to move forward! 

Lorena and I are both writing.  I hope to finish another discipleship book by the end of November.  Lorena is writing a unique curriculum for teaching and training the illiterate, using her experience in Africa and India.  We are also writing a joint book on missions. 

The family is doing well. Caleb and Nate are finishing high school at home and taking some classes at Shasta Community College. Nate has also enrolled in the Welding Certificate program at the Community College.  This will our first Christmas in America in ten years!  It’s wonderful to be in the same town as our daughter, Marissa, and her family and Matthew along with his wife Danica. Leaving family and friends behind is one of the greatest sacrifices missionaries make.  We’re blessed to be reunited with our family for this season and hope to see many more of you during this time as well. 

We so appreciate all your support and prayers over the years.  

Love,

Brian and Lorena

Moving Forward

Moving Forward!

20,000 New Books    

We have plans to print 20,000 of our discipleship books in Malawi.   We usually print a thousand books at a time locally in Mozambique.  Unfortunately, printing prices have really climbed.  Our plan is to have a large quantity printed across the border in Malawi.   A ministry in Blantyre can print the books at less than half price.  We are currently working on getting permission from the Mozambican government to bring the books into the country without custom fees.  We would appreciate your prayers!

Transition    

We are now working both in Mozambique and Redding, California.  Lorena’s mother is 94 years old and needs to move in with us.  We are in the process of organizing a house that will be suitable for her needs.  Our boys are also at the high school age now where they need more intense school courses, which are not available in Mozambique.  For this reason, we are settling in Redding, California, where our daughter and her family live, while continuing our ministry in Mozambique through regular visits, ongoing writing projects, and continual oversight of our seminars and ongoing recording projects through video chats, regular phone calls, and online banking.  We still maintain our house in Mozambique at our center in Dondo, and continue working with two other missionary families living there.  We also remain the directors of the pastoral discipleship program in Central Mozambique with over 1,000 Comunhao na Colheita churches in the 6 provinces.  After we settle things a bit, Brian plans on taking a month-long trip to Mozambique to conduct two pastoral training conferences in the provinces of Nampula and Zambezia, as well as touch base with our missionary team in Dondo, and our Mozambican discipleship teams.

More Fruit      

Last October, we received several prophetic words saying we would be seeing more fruit than ever before in our ministry.  Interestingly, this is a time of transition for us, where we will be spending less time living in Mozambique.  So how will we see even more fruit?  Yesterday I (Lorena) saw a glimpse of what God is stirring up.  I was talking to Pastor Mario, who heads our seminar program.  He was telling me how he and his wife’s children’s ministry program is flourishing, how they learned from me and use my curriculum, and how much they wanted me to come see it. (They live 10 hours from our home in Dondo.)  These children, by the way, have begun inviting their parents.  Now they are excited, adding in number, and it's turning into a new church for all ages!  As Pastor Mario and I talked, we agreed how great it would be to teach the pastors at the next conference how to begin and run a children’s ministry at their own churches.  I told him I couldn’t go now, but he could teach them.  He hesitated, but after some encouragement, he agreed excitedly that this was still a good idea and he and his wife could teach them well!  Sometimes people flourish when their leaders leave and they are left to fly on their own.  We’re blessed to have good leaders in place that will continue the ministry and apparently bare even MORE fruit!