Music Opens a Door for the Gospel in Tempe — Summer 2007

We were convicted, stirred, encouraged, and edified by an excellent Clement Okusi revival in January, and Dennis Wright brought more of the same in March. Because the gospel works in every language, we had Roy Sublasky and Jesus Celaya come to preach revivals for our Spanish service. This ministry has been fruitful for us and we are seeing the beginnings of growth in it.

Pastor Aulson recently finished a Sunday School series on stewardship, during which the church saw many notable financial miracles as we put sound financial principles into practice. In our annual business meeting we saw the results of good stewardship as the financial report showed that we handled more than $1 million in a year for the first time ever! We believe this is only the first of many millions that God will allow us to invest in His kingdom, as we continue to give to His work.

More than 25% of our budget went to support pioneer works and missionaries. We have been blessed to take over the support of Chris and Melanie Aulson as they have followed God’s call to South Africa.

Our music scene has found new life, as we have been mixing it up with park outreaches, movies, barbecues, and theme nights. We have been seeing fruit from this ministry and believe that God will continue to give us increase.

At the end of January we had a Native American Weekend with Artie Aragon, along with several saints from the Chinle church who cooked up excellent food. We also enjoyed their rap group’s excellent ministry. To advertise this, we held a youth extreme outreach that saw more than 200 young people from area churches in attendance - and on outreach! The weekend was a great success, with scores of visitors and dozens saved.

As I write this, we have just come out of our third May conference, where we were powerfully challenged to give our best to the kingdom of God. We were thrilled to announce Lado and Tamie Esquivel into Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as well as five new domestic works from us and our daughter churches. The theme of this conference was The God of Breakthroughs, and we have been seeing breakthroughs in several areas over the past few months.

As we continue to give our best couples to the challenge of the harvest field, God continues to give us more resources to support these works and more couples who step up to give themselves. We are privileged to do the work of God with our partners in this fellowship.