Red Nueva Vida USA: Chicago Trip, Baptisms, and People of Peace Training

 

Here is a quick update on the ministry with Red Nueva Vida/New Life Network. I (Ben) traveled to our church partner just north of Chicago to visit and serve them and their pastor. I was able to witness a special time of baptisms as well at a park and a great time of fellowship after.

On August 31st we celebrated the day of New Life Network in which we celebrate all God is doing globally and also take a special offering to support a project together. This year we helped raise money for Venezuela. We are beginning to partner with about 12 churches there.

We commissioned 2 new disciplers on this Sunday as well.

New Discipleship Group

This a new disicpleship group that was started in May and I was able to join them for some training this last Sunday and will be doing this the next couple of weeks as well. Please pray with them as they work towards forming a church.

New schools, parks, libraries and more.

 The girls love libraries and parks and so we spend a fare amount of time at these facilities. In Guatemala these do not exist or are very limited so we have been enjoying since moving back. Here are a few pics from recent visits. We are glad to have both a library and a few parks within walking distance.

Emma loves to swing!

This is a tractor that the boys played on when they were little. Luke still enjoys it 😃

This is a park we just discovered in a neighboring neighborhood.

Grace and Sofia are doing well in their new school. Sofia won student of the month for her class last month. The 2nd graders also get a Bible at their school. We are so proud of both of them!

This is Joel at his new culinary school he is taking. We are proud of him as well and the great job he is doing balancing homeschool, culinary school and a new job.

Developing Fervent Prayer

 “Prayer—secret, fervent, believing prayer—lies at the root of all personal godliness,” says the great missionary William Carey.

It is an area in which most Christians struggle yet it lies at the root of all personal godliness. It is an area I (Ben) have been striving to grow in. I have been reading on it, trying to practice it more and leading our family and our team of pastors in it. It lies at the core of what we want to see God do in our family and in the ministry I am leading. We are working towards seeing a movement of discipleship. But as I keep repeating to myself and to our team, "Without a movement of prayer, we won't see a movement of disicpleship."

Here are a few things we have been trying to do to develop fervent prayer in Red Nueva Vida:

This is a monthly prayer time we have together. It is online most of the time but we try to gather physically every 2-3 months for those that are local.

This is an early morning weekly prayer time we have together.

I was encouraged to hear a few of our pastors have started their own online prayer groups. And more are working towards the same.

Please continue to pray for our family and the pastors and churches I get to serve. We have a retreat in October where we will focus on prayer and strive to grow in it more together. 

First days of school, Birthdays, Anniversary, Another Licensed Driver and other Family Fun

 

The girls are off to a good start for the new school year.

They started at a new Christian School this year not too far from our home. We are grateful for this opportunity for them.

Time at Mamaw and Papaw's house.

Fun times with the cousins before school started. They made Christmas cookies and listened to Christmas music in July.

We had a great celebration for Jennifer's birthday. We were glad that Levi and Alanna were able to come for the weekend.

Apparently this is the only picture we got of Levi and Alanna's visit in late August ;-) Not a Levi visit without a game of Catan.

Jennifer and I celebrate 27 years of marriage on August 1st.

Watchout world: Joel passed his driver's test and now has his license. He has many changes in the last few weeks. He got a job, got his license and started at a vocational training center here taking cooking courses.

We are glad that Luke has reconnected with a friend from school from years ago. They have been able to hangout a bit. They both love our minor league baseball team here in Indy so we took them to a game a few weeks back. 

Red Nueva Vida USA Update

 One of the things I (Ben) get to do is work with the churches we serve in helping prepare them to use the resources we have. Our goal is to help move our churches towards forming and reproducing disicples, healthy churches and leaders. We offer several resources to help them work towards this goal. Our main resources is our disicpleship route. Here are a few trainings I have done recently.

This was at Iglesia Esperanza Viva a church here in Indianapolis. I was doing training on the next few steps in the discipleship process.

This is a retreat that another church in Indy did not too long ago.

This is a leadership training I helped with at New Life Church Indy.

This is a prayer time before a disicpleship group launched with this group.

This is an evangelism training I did in a church north of Chicago.

Thanks for the continued prayers and support for our family and ministry! 

We have seen the work grow from 4 churches, 10 disciples in our disicpleship route in January 2024 when I started in this role to now having 7 churches involved, 8 disicpleship groups with 114 disciples, and 9 leaders in training. All glory to God!

 

Summer Fun

 

This was a gathering for the 4th of July for Ben's side of the family. We had a great time eating, talking, laughing, swimming and celebrating birthdays and the 4th.

We had a gathering for our pastors and families at our home in June. It was a fun time of food, fellowship and prayer. It is not easy gathering busy pastors and their families so I was grateful for the time together.

These are 4 of the 7 Pastors Ben gets to serve.

We were also happy to see our friends from Guatemala the Harmans.

They were staying at this beautiful place on a lake about 2 hours north of Indianapolis.

Here is the whole crew. They have 7 kids and we have 8 so when we used to get our families together it was a crowd ;-)

The girls got to go bowling.

Daddy daughter date for ice cream. Already starting to tell them that any boy who wants to get close to them has to talk to Dad first ;-)

Of course. lots of library visits this summer.

Ben took a day retreat to pray and plan for the rest of the year. He is also working on a 5 year vision. Please pray for this process.