• More prayer for each leader by name.
• Training, that the relatively new Christian leaders can learn to "pastor" their groups.
• Identifying more potential leaders.
• Honoring our cell group leaders at church.

Some of the practical ways we are trying to live this out:

• I handed out a prayer list with all our cell group leader, trainees and host families. Maybe we can all lift each other up daily.
• Tuesday night we all gather for training. I doubt that anyone has a study bible. They are too expensive. We have the inexpensive "pulpit" bibles. So we are making study bibles. I printed out topics with strings of verses and page numbers in small print. These are taped inside our bible covers. Then we color the verses lightly with pencil crayon and write the topic, the previous verse page number and the next verse page number. In this way we are making little "chains". Like I tell our leaders, "If you do this, you will appear wise, and you will be wise." The cell leaders also can get extra papers to help auxillary "trainees" or others in their cell.
• The church also has several discipleship groups and prayer meetings which help us grow in faith.
• A couple weeks ago we had a retreat. We told the church people to tell their cell group leaders if they wanted to come, and to pay them the R$5 entrance fee. The cell leaders told Nira who organized the outing. We also had a baptism while we were there. Once again, they told their cell leaders, and the cell leaders baptized the ones in their cell.
• More people would like to get baptized. I ask them to tell their cell group leaders, with whom we will work out the practical details like when and where.

Please pray for our small groups. It is not too far fetched that everybody could bring a friend one Sunday. Then we will have 400 people. It will be good to have a solid core of trained people who are eager to train new leaders.

And maybe we'll identify more ways to practically equip these new Christians to effectively make disciples of Jesus.

End.

• We are just moving into our office building. This involves using a "front" door that had little use before. Beside the door was a swarm of black bees, going in a out of some holes in the ground. Tim K told me he had sprayed this area with a bug spray daily for two weeks but this never diminished the activity. I got a shovel and dug down a foot or so. The earth was real soft and mixed with wax and a sour lemony smelling honey, and a small cloud of bees. I threw a rag with some alchool on it in the hole and lit it. After awhile it was kind of smouldering so I left it. I was not worried about the brick and cement building. That was Friday. Sunday a wind blew up and it flamed up. I guess the wax down underground burned smoked the whole time. It must have been a very big nest.
• Over the past months three swarms of honey bees have come to Clenildo's house. He learned how to make the box and moved them out to the training site one swarm at a time in his little car. I'm not sure how he did that. But he brought us 1/2 liter of honey the other day!
• Clenildo's friend saw some bees in an old tire the other day, in the bush. He harvested 21 liters of honey out of the old tire! It's worth about $10 per liter at the market so this was a real windfall.

End.