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!