Great Thanksgiving Week

It was a fantastic week and weekend, despite battling a lot of bad weather. I will let the pictures speak for themselves with their captions.

A new Burmese couple were my visitors on Sunday morning. We had several other visitors as well.

The Karen girls with my daughters and their Karen dresses.

Men's outing on Tuesday night. We had eleven men out. Perhaps we can turn the world upside down.

Bro. Jonathan leading a Karen man to Christ using a translator.

Had some men from our church over for Thanksgiving who have no family on this side of the world. They have never played darts before. My wife and I found them to be quite good at it.

What a Blessing!

Matthew 5:10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

During our morning service time our assistant pastor noticed these signs placed around our building, so he started picking them up and toting them off to the dumpster in the back. Then he was confronted by a man who came seemingly from nowhere and told him that he he was stealing his property. The man told him that he was exercising his right to picket our church because of what we believe! After arguing for several minutes the man decided to leave for now. Here is the reason behind the title...

I sent this picture to a pastor friend of mine and he texted me back and said, "what a blessing." I thought about it for a second and decide he was right. It is a blessing to be persecuted for righteousness' sake! By the way, let me make clear that we do not hate Sodomites, nor does God. However, God hates the act of Sodomy and we preach that fact here. Apparently it isn't well liked by everyone that we do preach against it, especially in our neighborhood. We have a church five blocks away from us that has a rainbow flag painted on their sign!

The Week After

Bro. Painter and Hieu Nguyen

This was the week after our seven week campaign, which usually the week after a campaign is pretty flat. However, not the case for us, overall we had several visitors and one baptized. It really was a pretty good week following the the excitement of our Big Day. I was excited to see our assistant pastor bring a convert from Saturday named Hieu, who also followed the Lord in believers baptism. We even had some visitors come from Virginia. They were in Omaha for a wedding the previous day and decided to drive one hour to Lincoln so they could attend our church. They had seen our website and decided they liked the look of our church. I was delighted to hear that they actually drove an hour out of their way to attend a soul winning church! Praise God for others who want the soul winning atmosphere too!!!

A Diverse Church

The crowd after Sunday morning service

We had our final week of "Christ is Our Mission" and had Missionary Nathan Owens with us for the weekend. One of the comments made by the visiting missionary and his wife was how diverse our church is and what a sweet spirit there is among such a diverse crowd. Then one of our men took this picture and sent it to me on Sunday afternoon. I got to looking at the picture and figuring up where everybody is from and realized something... Wow, eleven different nations are represented in this auditorium! I also realized that there is a sweet spirit in our church these days!!! Somebody say, Amen!!!

I preached on "Christ is a Master Soul Winner" on Sunday morning. At the invitation time we had 4 Nigerians come to know Christ as their personal Saviour. We had a total of 5 public professions made and 129 in Sunday school. (Which I thought was very good considering our bus numbers were a lot lower than normal.)

Sunday night we had a presentation about South Africa from Brother Owens and then we had him preach. He preach a fantastic message on repairing the altar of the heart. He and his wife also did a fantastic job on Saturday out soul winning. They followed up on several Cameroonians in our area. This was helpful especially since the Owens have planted several churches in Cameroon and can speak the language. Pleased pray for the Owens while they work at raising the rest of their support so they can get to South Africa and start churches there.

Missionary Owens and his wife