2009 Goal Reviews

The first week of January last year I took a few days away from Tacna to rest, pray, and meditate. During that time a few goals for the year of 2009 were set. Here those goals and others by the Peruvian leaders.

I. Youth Group
a. 15 Baptisms
b. 9 Discipleships
c. 2 Guitarists
d. 3+ families coming to the church
e. Teaching in Sunday School
f. More responsibility and less anger

II. Tacna Churches
a. Train Leaders
b. 1 new preacher
c. 2 Cell Groups
d. 3 Marriages Counseled

III. Self-Sustained Vision
a. One business up and running by years end
b. Preparing second business for 2010

We had a pretty good year, even though there were some pretty big setbacks. Not all of our goals were met, but many were and we are happy to have had some things change during the year that the spirit moved in us and the church. Here is a brief review of each goal:

I. Youth Groups
a. Baptisms: 7 in Ciudad Nueva, 4 Culto.com
b. 10 Discipleships started...sadly none finished. But we have already begun with some of the same disciples this year and quite a few more new disciples.
c. 3 guitarists were being taught last year from the youth group in Ciudad Nueva
d. 3 families from the youth group have attended the church many times throughout the year
e. 2 youth are now teaching in Sunday School in Ciudad Nueva
f. There is considerably less anger and the youth group is helping out a lot more with missions, cleaning up the church, and helping out with the activities in the church

II. Tacna churches
a. The leaders began reading a leadership book together and we have begun to do evaluations on a regular basis
b. The person we were hoping to raise up to preach has come into some serious financial problems and has no free time at all to be trained
c. The two cell groups were not accomplished, but we were able to bring groups together and read a book together to help their marriages called, The 10 Commandments of Marriage.
d. 6 couples attended marriage studies or counseling.
e. We celebrating two weddings

III. Self- Sustained church
a. The School supply store was started late December and is going very well
b. We have a plan to get the Hardware Store up and running the end of the third quarter of 2010

I will write more on the goals for the fiscal year which begins today. Some are a continuation of the goals mentioned above and others are completely new and exciting. Thank you all for your support and prayers.

Night of the Stars!!!!

We had our first ever Talent Show in Ciudad Nueva and it was a hit. We had a big audience of neighbors, the youth group, their parents and classmates, etc all in the church to see what they could do. Their was a variety of dances, singing, a magic show, choreographies, and lip-singing (seriously). It was fun. We had our three judges (three young adults from the previous youth group) critiquing their perfomances and the crowd going crazy all night.

What we want to encourage is their abilities and desires to be able to foster them into a life ministry not just inside the church, but of course including the church. One of our goals was to have musicians in Ciudad Nueva by years end and three people from the youth group are learning guitar and hopefully will play in a service by the end of the year. One of them played guitar and sang with another girl from the group.

In all it was a success and we were able to enjoy seeing small fruits of this years work with the youth group.

Weeds!!!

We are trying to imbed in the habits of the youth the importance of helping out and doing unselfish work for good. To encourage them with more than words we are organizing doing more things like we did a couple weeks ago. We went to the park in Nueva Jerusalen to help clean it up and pull out all the weeds. As a group of 13 we spent about 3 hours working the soil and it was fun. The last photo doesn't do justice, but the pile of weeds was about 7 feet long by 5 feet wide, and about 4 feet high...it was BIG!