They have arrived...

It's been 6 weeks of planning and preperations and the day has finally come and gone. The Vision Team has arrived. This team consists of MB pastors and church leaders from California and Ontario. Their purpose in being here in Portugal is to offer support and encouragement to Otto and Marjorie. It is also our hope and prayer that this team will return to their respected churches and tell them what is happening in Portugal. We need churches to have a renewed vision for Portugal and we need workers to be here for the long haul.
So, this week we are helping Otto & Marjorie out by hosting this team of 12. Us as a Trek team are doing all of the cooking. We are currently residing at PBI (Portuguese Bible Institute), which is located in the Tojal area just outside of Lisbon and we will be here until February 26th. So far we are enjoying ourselves and enjoying meeting with and getting to know the vision team members, even if our room does reak of moth balls :)


Saturday during the day, we headed over to the Amadora church to take part in a Leadership in the Church seminar that the vision team put on. It was a neat day full of interacting with great people and seeing people from the different churches interacting and dialoging with each other about leadership. It was encouraging to see and hear as this is not necessarily a common occurance.

I have neglected my camera as of late, so I have been trying to get more shutter-happy these last few days. Enjoy the pictures!

A typical Sunday includes Heidi and I singing on the worship team at the Loures church. We unfortunately are unable to look up from our sheet of music often due to the language thing. We're working on it though and actually today we had the opportunity to sing the Revelation Song in english for the vision team. It was a nice treat.

We also teach the sunday school class, which is made up of 3 extremely awesome kids: Mieka, Sofia and Josh.

On Friday we had the opportunity to take some time to explore the town of Tojal.

Like I said, on Saturday, we had the opportunity to attend a leadership workshop put on by members of the vision team. The event required a lot of translating between Portuguese and English. We have some extremely gifted leaders here with us who did a phenomenal job.

Today we attended all 3 church services. I always love going to the Amadora church. The community and the music is phenomenal.

Plus, they serve deep-fried dough balls after every service. I LOVE deep fried dough. I mean, what's not to love???

These are a few of the kids in the Massama church. They are a neat bunch of kids. Most of the kids attend church weekly without their parents. Their parents are not part of the church, but these kids are some of our most faithful attenders each week. It's neat to see the joy on their faces when they enter the church.

I apologize for the scatteredness of this post. Please continue to keep our team and the vision team here with us in your prayers this week. It is our prayer that this would be a really neat week of encouragement and renewed vision for the global church and what is going on here in Portugal.

Please also continue to pray for the people in our churches. I hope that they feel supported and encouraged by the vision team and also by us this week in particular. We want to see them grow in their faith and have boldness to lead in their churches.

Thanks!