The cobra was felled by a  rock to the head launched by a slingshot from our able gardener.  While he's been diminishing the snake population, we've been teaching church planting to local churches, helping a short-term church planting/medical mission team, following up with new church plants, learning a new method of story telling, and leading several small discipleship groups.

Three local churches have now planted churches nearby with lay leaders from within their churches.  Each of them had a small team of Americans work with them for a week going door to door in the villages and a medical team for one day treating villagers.  These villages now have 3 small fellowships meeting.  Last weekend Jeff visited one of the local fellowships and taught them the story of creation and Lazarus' resurrection.  There were over 45 people there. 

Jeff spent 6-8 hours training each church in church planting principles.  Emphasis was put on making disciples.  Now the lay people within the churches have a vision for participating in the work.  We're happy to report that some of them are now participating in leading weekly meetings and visiting people in their homes to follow up with them. 

Jeff and his co-worker, Awor, went to Delhi for four days to learn a method of story telling from an organization called The God's Story Project.  They learned how to question people to help them discover the truth of God's word for themselves.  It's a way of observing the text in an intentional manner to learn the message(s) that God communicates.  As they've shared this with their students, the students' response has been one of wonder at how much they can learn from a simple story.

One of those students is Abishek Pradhan.  He's the pastor of the church that we attend.  He's been teaching some of his church members the things that he's been learning in one of the small groups that Jeff's been leading.  He's now planning to have those students lead other small groups in the church  To find out the most significant things that Abishek has learned, click here.

We've been blessed this year to see God do so much through us.  He's been faithful to provide all of our needs through so many of our friends.  If you want to see some of what we believe God's leading us to do over the next year, click here.

Love,

Jeff, Trish, Luke and Victoria

P.S. Several of our pages have now been updated, like our partner page, our prayer requests and our schedule.  Check it out!