Our New Church Home

I would love to introduce you to what may be our new church home for the year that we are in Quelimane. This is a small church plant in a neighboring village called Coalane. It takes us about 15-20 minutes to get there on a super bumpy road. 


The church began 5 years ago. The pastor is a gentleman named João. He is also Lee's language teacher. They are the same age and are becoming great friends. Pastor João and his wife have 5 children ranging from 19 years to 2 months. (Sorry I did not think to get a picture of him on Sunday.) Please pray for God's blessing on their family and favor on their ministry.

This is the church and the children's Sunday School class.

Here is the inside of the church. (These children were early and followed me around before church started.)

About 1 year ago, journey-girl Sally, began working with the children during the adult Sunday School time. She has a great gift for working with children and has seen God bless her ministry with the kids. In the early days of children's Sunday School there were only a small handful of kids. Now Sally averages 30 kids per Sunday. One week there were 62 kids!


Here Sally gets the children seated onto straw mats for a Bible story.

After the Bible story the children do a craft relating to the story. There is a scripture verse that goes with it for them to take home. Here they are working on their craft. Can you guess what the story was this week?

At this point I can't really do much. I can only say greetings. However, this week I was able to hold a baby who had come strapped to the back of her sister (who was about 5 years old) so she could participate in the lesson. I didn't mind a bit!

The McDaniel girls are struggling understandably to find their place. They are already shy kids, but throw in the language barrier, mix it with a culture gap and they really don't know what to do with themselves at church. They are participating as much as they can and enjoying it some. (That is better than hating it, which was the reaction the first couple of weeks at other churches.)

The area where the church sits is very swampy and full of rice fields and little ponds. As we were driving down the tiny road toward the church we noticed small frogs jumping EVERYWHERE! I suppose every tadpole in the district decided it was the day to take to land! We got to the church and frogs were everywhere there, too. All during the service frogs were jumping around the church and the children were laughing and swatting them. It was very hard to focus on the few words of portuguese we could understand coming from the pastor's mouth! Here is a picture I got of a frog after the service. They were all about 1 1/2 inches long. All I could think of was the plague of the frogs in Egypt!!! 

 As we pulled away from the church we saw all of these small children swimming in one of the ponds, many of them with no clothes on.

The journey-girls or Wanne usually take a load of children home from church. Here they are getting out of the truck to run home.

I just love the little village that is around the church. It is so different than the city that we live in! I would love to one day live in a place like this. Notice how clean it is. The ladies get out and SWEEP the dirt to get all trash, leaves, fruit, etc. out of the yard.

That's it! Pray for us to develop relationships with the believers in this place and seek out the lost with them.

Tracy