January 2024 Velasquez Family Update

Dear Pastor, Congregation and Friends,

January is always a time of strategizing for us as we make plans for the new year. Thankfully we don’t have to come up with anything innovative as we know what our mission is: to make disciples of Christ, which involves evangelism and discipling! We define making disciples in this way: making disciples includes teaching unbelievers the gospel (evangelism) and helping those that respond positively to the gospel (conversion) to be fruitful, mature and reproducing disciples of Christ (discipling). With that definition in mind, this year we are going to be focusing on evangelism and discipling. So here are some of the ways that we plan to grow in these areas as a church here in Colmenar Viejo, Madrid:

Our main focus in evangelism is to teach the gospel to unbelievers in person. This can be done in public places, in homes, in the church building, etc… and it can be one-on-one or in groups. We teach the gospel because we believe the gospel has to be explained clearly and persuasively to unbelievers, and we do it in person, because while there are many tools that can be used to reach people remotely, our ultimate aim is to engage with unbelievers in person. Towards that end we will be continuing the work of training our church in evangelism (which is one of the ways that we disciple them) and we will develop tools to help our church teach the gospel to unbelievers. One tool is gospel materials, the other tool is the Come and See Recording Studio. I look forward to sharing more details about these tools in future updates. But we plan to start creating and uploading gospel videos on Youtube and sharing them on social media in the next two months.

In discipling we want to see more of our members actively involved in discipling others. Our mid-week Bible study has been a great way to disciple the church, but in addition to that we have created smaller groups (between 3-5 people) that are studying the Scriptures together, and we want many of these groups to be facilitated by members, other than me, in the future. This will allow me to focus on training believers to lead these groups and not have to teach all of these groups myself. One particular need is women that can teach other women. Faviana is doing a great job with this, but we want to have more ladies that can disciple other ladies. We have great resources that we are using in discipling believers, but this year I plan to write more material that will help in the discipling process. 

As I shared in our last letter, we recently went through a challenging time in our life and ministry. We have lost several members for different reasons. We are in the process of rebuilding, which is not easy. But thankfully, we don’t have to figure out what to do with our time. We believe that if we focus on making disciples, the Lord will grow His work here, in His time and in His way. Thank you for your prayers and support!

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