By Aaron & Esther Helland
Happy summer! While it’s warming up for you Northern Hemisphere dwellers, for us Southern Hemisphere dwellers it’s getting colder! And since houses here don’t have central heating or air, we feel the temperatures a lot more than when we lived in the United States. But we are so grateful and excited to be here; we just have to bundle up and we are set!
Here you will see a picture of our group of disciples. We are mentoring four powerful pastors who have wonderful church-planting and missions callings. They are Pastors Rone and Cacia, Samuel and Graciene, Gildo and Zelia, and Elielson and Solange. Between the group of them, they have planted well over 100 churches throughout Brazil and led thousands of people to the Lord. What a privilege to work with such amazing pastors!
Our church plant saw over 500 attendees for the first time last Sunday! We have practically doubled our attendance since January and that is even without the church officially launching yet!
It looks like we will be closing on a building where we can have a 1200 seat auditorium this month. If that happens, we can officially launch the church late this year or early next year after we remodel our new building.
We have been working hard on setting up the children’s ministry at our church here in São Paulo. We are ministering to about 60 kids each Sunday now, and we know more and more will be coming, so we are getting ready for them! Our dream is that the children will love kids’ church so much that they insist that their parents bring them and consequently bring their parents to church too. Aaron and I were helping at an evangelistic outreach a few weeks ago and next to me was a mother who started telling me how her son kept asking what day of the week it was, because he was anxious for Sunday to come so he could go to children’s church. Of course she would have to take him! Well, she did take him and then received the Lord during the altar call!! Praise God!!! Our passion is to see these children influencing their families and friends for Jesus so that many, many precious people, young and old, will come to know Him and His amazing love.
Thanks so much for your important ministry as you support us here in Brazil!
