Prince & Gina’s Praise Report from Spain
Dear Prayer Partners,
May the Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you always! Gina and I want to wish you a very belated blessed New Year! We also wanted to give you a summary of our church planting progress in 2005 as we move into 2006.
In The Beginning…
If you’ll allow me to say, the church here began pretty much just like one concept of the creation. Genesis 1:2 says, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Some believe that there was something her before [this present] heaven and earth but that it suffered some kind of horrible catastrophe, was destroyed and recreated.
Well, I don’t know if I believe that, but it still serves to illustrate my point. When we arrived in Cáceres, last year we found an unformed, devastated remnant of what had almost been a church. There were eleven people (only four of them were baptized believers) that had been part of a fairly new work that started out bad and went south from there. The catastrophic damage was so great that news of the scandal here spread far and wide, was constantly in the local newspapers and would make an “R” rated movie that Christians would protest. Pastors and Christian leaders from several denominations from hundreds of kilometers radius gathered continually to see how this breach to the Evangelical testimony in this part of Spain could be repaired. Many of these leaders knew us from years ago and also know we had plans to return to Spain. So they made a formal invitation to see if we would choose to take charge of the the work in Cáceres. We gladly accepted.
Apart from the scandals of crass immorality, abuse and various other unimaginable sins, the church was deeply in debt (20 grand) because of misappropriation of funds. So one of the first things that Gina and I had to do was to take out a loan for the owed amount and pay off all of the church’s debts. We then found and rented a new building, officially changed the name of the church and began anew. The new congregation is paying off that loan as part of the church’s monthly expenses.
Since then, in such a short period of time, God has brought such healing to the land. We were able to break and cancel the curses that had formerly mulled the land and God has opened up great doors of favor and ministry into the lives of hundreds of new contacts. He has brought light to overcome the darkness in many lives and the Spirit of God is moving preciously. Praise God that Gina and I have been able to earn the respect of all of the other Christian leaders in this region of the country and of the community at large sees us in a very favorable and encouragingly positive light.
The congregation has grown rapidly with all new converts and contacts and has become the largest and fastest growing church in this part of the country. Of course this is always good, but it presents it own set of pleasant challenges. We’ve not yet been able to transition the church into the cell church model for we are still just laying basic foundations (in Biblical teachings, convictions and disciplines), but we have about 100 new adults and about 35 children that have begun to come faithfully every Sunday. The challenge is to consolidate and disciple all of these new Believers with just a handful of mature Believers that are still being discipled by me.
Gina was finally able to establish an excellent multilevel Sunday school program that is fundamental but is so good that 4 out of 6 of the other pastors in our province that have been here for years have asked her to help them establish their Sunday school programs. Also, after years of being somewhat inactive in my ministry as a psalmist, I’ve been able to form a worship team that, slowly but surely is learning to flow in the Spirit of true worship and praise. So now the church is also gaining notoriety for our ministry of worship and praise.
Team Ministry & the Ministry Center
We have a small team of missionaries in training for career missionary work serving with us in various aspects of the ministry.
Varian Dean, from Chicago, IL, has set up a school of English classes that we offer as an out reach to the community. He has done a fine job and it is bringing in several people that we probable would not have been able to reach otherwise.
Lucienda Smith, from New Jersey, is working with our youth and some areas of consolidation and outreach. She is also a strong vocalist on our worship.
Stess Cain, from Washington/Idaho, our most recent addition to the team, has brought so much to the table in the way of talent, experience, intelligence and maturity. She is an accomplished violinist and is a tremendous addition to our worship team. Slowly but surely she is taking over our children’s ministry to develop it to its fullest potential for that is her burden and vision.
The three of them are in varying stages of linguistic development, for they’ve had to learn Spanish here on the field, still they have marvelous additions to our labor here. We are praying for more to hear the call to dedicate their entire lives to foreign missions. If you feel that God has called you and would like to join our missionary discipleship training team, please contact us and we will tell you what steps you need to take.
The Ministry Center
Finally in summary, because of the housing needs of the missionary discipleship training team, office spaces, guest housing (for the may visitors and ministry teams that come this way) and many other needs we’ve begun the construction of our international ministry center headquarters. With your remarkable help and support and the contributions of those that are on the ministry team with us here, we were about to raise all of the initial funds to begin the building of our ministry center.
The actual construction should be finished by December of this year and after government inspections, red tape and other “stuff” that the local government has to do to grant entry approval; they will give us the keys probably around February of 2007… a little over a year from now. However, when they give us the keys we will have to come up with another major payment of about $30,000. We believe God for complete provision between now and then. The ministry center will have ten bedrooms, two kitchens, four complete bathrooms and four half baths or washrooms, two large offices, two garages for sever vehicles and space enough for several cell meetings and other functions to be held simultaneously.
Pray for the stability and increase in strength of the dollar. The total cost of the international ministry center is 540,000 €.
The Biggest Surprise
The Catholic recently approved of the showing of the movie, “Luther” in local theaters here in Spain. Something that would not have happened five years ago! Seemingly as a result I, along with the other two Evangelical pastors in our city, received an invitation to meet with the priest of the wealthiest parish here. He wanted to meet with us in one of our churches. It turns out that he has come to us with an olive branch of peace. He formally asked us forgiveness for having called us heretics and having opposed Evangelical “Protestants” all of these years and said that he now understood that Martin Luther was actually a prophet of God! Since then, the Father Miguel Angel Morán Manzano and I have become good friends. He has told me that he not only wants fellowship with us, but our personal friendship!
He and several of his leaders have already joined us for three very exciting unity prayer meetings. He has a group of about 60 Charismatics in his parish and he has invited us (the three Evangelical churches) to have a unity worship/prayer service at his parish. All of the pastors have agreed that I should officiate the service. So alone with elements of our worship group, I’ve invited three or four Catholics and two from each of the other Evangelical churches to form one worship team for that special service.
In the more than 25 years that I have ministered in predominantly Catholic countries, I have never had this happen… nor have any of the other pastors here! Father Miguel Angel’s friendship makes ministry for us here so much easier. We would MUCH rather have the Catholics as friends than as an opposition. For their opposition, quite frankly, can get very hideous! Believe me!
One Other Thing
For those of you that get a snail mail hard copy of our newsletter and desire to receive an emailed version, please drop us a note. Some of you that used to receive our emailed praise report and wonder why you stopped receiving it just ask the question, “Did I change my email address?” We get a lot of automatic replies bouncing back to us from address that are no longer valid. So please let us know if you’d like to continue receiving our cyber prayer updates.
Our email address is:
prince_parker@mail2missionary.com. I must add that this address is for ministerial correspondence only please. For all casual communications with us, which we heartily welcome, please write us at:
prince_parker@hotmail.com.
Once Again, You’ve Been A Big Blessing!
Finally, thank you so much for all of your prayers and loving support of our ministry and may God continue to bless you for your generosity! You are a BIG BLESSING to our lives and the lives of countless others that you help us to reach for Christ! We love and deeply appreciate you all!
H.M.S.,
Prince & Gina Parker
Prince & Gina Parker
