Prayer Requests

If you think about it, please pray for the following needs for our ministry here in Macedonia:

1. Language Acquisition
We continue to have Macedonian lessons three times a week and we learn more every day. We are able to say many things, but the biggest challenge is understanding. Please pray that God will continue to help us learn the language at an accelerated pace. When it comes to one-on-one ministry, especially in youth group, this is a huge need for us.

2. Albanian Church Plant
We will begin to lead worship for a new church plant on the Albanian side of Skopje in a couple of weeks. We are specifically trying to reach out to Muslims, so we need both God's direction and protection. We are going to be learning songs in the Albanian language, so we need prayer for that as well. Please remember the missionaries, the church and us as we participate in this exciting new endeavor.

3. Girl From Youth Ministry
We have a girl who has recently been banned by her father to come to the church anymore. He has even threatened physical violence against her, her family and the leaders of the church. Please pray that God would intervene and that the father would not only have a change of heart, but come to know Jesus in the process!

Two Days, Four Cities

Last weekend, we had a great time traveling around the country for ministry. We started on Saturday evening in Negotino with guitar lessons and youth service. We had several visitors from Veles, along with our usual group, so it was a good crowd. Things are going well there as we continue to make improvements to our service format.

Sunday morning, we were in Kratovo to preach at the church there. We are enjoying getting to know Anita and the church there. We stayed and had fellowship over lunch, and walked around the city and talked. We will be doing our best to go and preach in Kratovo every month as we are able.

From Kratovo, we stopped in Stip and visited the church there. Several of the pastors in Macedonia have come out of the ministry of the church in Stip and we had not been able to meet anyone there until last weekend. We met with the pastor of the church there and spent a little time getting to know them. Unfortunately, we had to leave to get to our next service, but it was nice to at least introduce ourselves and meet some new faces.

From Stip, we traveled to Veles for the evening service. Pastor Dragan was out of the country, so he asked us to come and preach. We had a great time there as well. When we finally got back home, we were very tired, but it was a very exciting and productive evening for us.

Youth Ministry Updates

Well, much has happened since our last post. We are getting into the regular pattern of the school year, so we haven't posted much lately so that we don't get too redundant on our post. Almost every week, we travel out to Negotino for our youth meeting. Things are going well there. We have around 5 students coming on a regular basis. Each week, we try to add another element into the service to make it more like what we want. We have a good friend from Veles, named Borche, who comes out each week to interpret and help out on the praise team. Dustin plays guitar and sings, Brittany is on keyboard and vocals, and Borche helps on bass or guitar. It is challenging to concentrate on playing and singing words in Cyrillic at the same time. We try to learn a couple of songs for each service.

We arrive each week early to have guitar lessons with two of the teenagers in our group. Our hope is to teach them until they are comfortable playing on the team with us. So far, everything is going well with the lessons.

Our youth service consists of some worship, a game, some Bible quiz questions, preaching and prayer. We are teaching a series called "Kingdom Living." Last week, we talked about being a servant. In the next few weeks, we will cover the topics of prayer, fasting, worship, giving, and talk about what the Scriptures teach us about how to live in the Kingdom of God here on earth. We are excited about being able to work with these young believers.

We have had the great opportunity to meet many of the believers and church leaders throughout the country. It is exciting for us to feel more accepted by them and feel like we are actually a part of what is going on here. We talked with some of the leadership about an idea that we had for a short winter teenager camp, and we have scheduled a three day event in January that we will help coordinate. It is very exciting to be a part of the team. Pray that our numbers will grow so more will be reached.