This past Thursday night we faced cold, and blustery conditions. However, we had 23 soul winners come out for our weekly church wide soul winning time. With snow falling in the dark of night we went out and saw 16 precious souls come to trust Christ as their Saviour. This is a good bunch of people that God has given me to lead. Our city needs them and I need them. We had a good weekend despite lower attendance numbers. We saw one follow the Lord in believer's baptism. We finished the year with 73 following the Lord in believer's baptism. One of our lower years, but still very good. We did produce our biggest year of souls being saved with 2,083 of them this past year. Every number represents a soul. Souls are important to God, so souls should be important to us too! This next year is going to be the year we start reaching some of the unreached neighborhoods of our town. We have some neighborhood left that we have not yet taken the Gospel to their doors. We are planning on changing that this year. Please pray for us this next year as we accomplish this tasks.

I have been so busy that I have been neglecting to put out a blog the past couple of weeks. We have had many things going on since my last blog. We had our State of the Church banquet on December 7th and our Christmas party on December 14th. God blessed both of those events in a special way. Then we got hit with a blizzard this past Wednesday which caused us to move our evening service up one hour and forced us to cancel soul winning on Thursday night. However, we rebounded nicely on Saturday by having 11 saved. Then this morning we had 1 saved and two baptized. One of them baptized this morning is pictured above. His name is Jesse and he just moved here from Indiana to take a new job with the Veteran's Administration. We had several visiting families this morning also, as well as another adult lady baptized. Everyone of them was special and significant in their own way. Thank God for His dear Son Who was born in order to die for us. Have a great Christmas!

We had a teen activity this past Friday night. We played a little basketball, at least a form of basketball. We bought a machine with two baskets and four mini-basket balls. The teens had a blast as we ate Cici's pizza and played a double elimination tournament. My wife and I both played. Of course, I won. I did however, have to make my way through the loser's bracket after being defeated by an 8th grade girl. It was a great time of fun and fellowship.

 This weekend we had a decent crowd. There were three that followed the Lord in believer's baptism. We had a great spirit overall. I preached a message on Sunday night called "And Bartholomew." It was a message about being good helpers. Bartholomew was seemingly insignificant as not much is said about him other than being listed as an Apostle. I preached on the fact that even though nothing is said about any great feats or accomplishments, he was surely a great helper to the others. May many in our church be willing to fill the helpers role.