Since we didn’t arrive until 4 a.m. on Saturday, we didn’t start our activities until the afternoon. After eating lunch with Tony Fernandez and his wife Liudmila, we went and visited a couple of the new “mission churches” in the province of Matanzas. The Versalles church in the city of Matanzas started planting churches in February of 2006; since then they’ve planted 14. They baptized 185 people last year. We went and visited two of the newest churches, one in Cárdenas, one in Limones.
The church planting methodology is fairly simple. They’ve chosen one road and proposed to plant a church in each town along that road. Prayer is an essential element. The church has a group that meets for prayer every morning, as well as a group that spends all afternoon praying on Sunday while members go out to help with the services at the mission churches. A contact is found in the target town, either through the radio program that I get to do or through acquaintances of other Christians. When the first person is converted, they are informed that the church will meet at their house the following Sunday. A group of prepared men share the work of helping these new churches; they say that they’ve never gone and found just one person waiting. They always gather friends and relatives to participate with them in the service.
Both congregations that we visited were encouraging, though we were especially touched by the spirit of the brothers in Limones. As we neared the house where they meet, a brother met us along the road. He was excited because he was obtaining materials to make a baptistry (drought conditions make it difficult to gather enough water for baptisms). This same man had also gotten a truck and worked repairing the road to his house so that Tony’s truck wouldn’t get beat up any worse than it already is. And this brother has only been a Christian for 3 months. Contagious enthusiasm.
On Sunday, the churches in the province gathered for a combined service. There are over 600 active members in Matanzas, though I’m guessing there were only about 400 at the service. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.