Sierraville Update

This year has started very busy with a bible study we started in November and we will continue to teach this year.  We will be doing discipleship with a few of the members of the church.

David will go to the annual Dumagat conference at the end of February,  and he has already contacted one of the pastors there to find out the schedule for that.

This month we will attend a prayer meeting with a local church who has invited us to pray for the government.   This will be a great place for the believers in Sierraville to connect and interact with believers in another godly church near us.  We are continuing to go through 2 Corinthians on Sunday morning services, and in 2 Timothy for our Sunday bible study.

The Wednesday bible study has been concentrated on missionary life and an introduction to details of missionary work, particularly what we were involved in, which was church planting.  We have started talking about church planting and all that is involved in it, with the goal of having a maturing church.  So we are looking at the particular goals of church planting, which are not that much different from being a pastor in a church.  We would say that a church can be judged as to how well they are doing overall on the basis of several things.  Are they filtering decisions and their world view on the truth of scripture, how are they doing in evangelism, discipleship, leadership development, and seeing the church function as a body.  Of course, no one church does everything perfectly, however what our goal was as church planters was to see that they are looking to grow in these ways.  The elders of the church should have the same goals, except as a missionary we wanted to develop teachers to take on the jobs of being elders in the church.  We would like to see that the church takes these things seriously and applies them to the church here.

We continue working on getting Bible studies with nonbelievers, working on getting believers in the church to get the studies going, and then observing as we teach them, with our goal that they will be able to lead a bible study.

Happy New Year to you all.  May you have a wonderful year enjoying the blessings of our Lord.  We hope that you can write us with your prayer requests.  We are still with Village Missions.  People sometimes ask how to send us gifts.  Please check the Village Missions.org website.

Thank you for your gifts of support and prayer,

David and Adriana Petro