The events of the past month have had us biting our nails and adding some grey hairs as we wondered whether our fledgling church was going to die for lack of a place to meet. You may remember in our last newsletter we mentioned that the landlord of the old cinema gave us notice to leave and has since re-let the building to another group. As we searched for an alternative meeting place we were turned down by one place after another for reasons that may have made perfect sense to the proprietors but were totally incomprehensible to us as outsiders. During our final service in Studio 333 we had to tell our people that we still did not know where we would meet the following Sunday, but promised that if we found a place we would phone around. God remains faithful. During that final week we received permission from the headmistress of a primary school in town to use one of the classrooms for our church services. We held our first service there last Sunday. Although numbers were reduced we still had a respectable congregation and there was a wonderful sense of the presence of God.  The room was rather small and lacked electric power, so as a long term venue it did not seem ideal. However we received further good news this week that the new classroom block which has been under construction is now ready, and this Sunday we can use a more spacious room which has power.

We were further encouraged by the launch of a midweek prayer meeting last Tuesday evening. One of our members is a Congolese doctor and he offered his house for midweek meetings. We agreed to start this past week, and turned up without much hope of many people joining us. To our surprise and joy we had 11 adults plus our 4 boys. I had baked a cake to share and it only barely went around! Again there was a powerful sense of the presence of God and people were very willing to pray aloud. We really had a sense that the Lord is building something precious here.

Now that we have a secure venue we plan to pursue what has always been our plan and to launch a second service in Portuguese to run immediately after the English service. This will be a significant challenge to us in terms of language skills and stamina. However the potential for growth in the city will be severely restricted if we limit our work to the small expatriate community. Although we are convinced that beginning the English church was by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, we do not believe that we have been called here only to start an international church. Our primary call is to the Mozambican people. So the coming weeks will see us busy preparing for this new venture.

Gregory has recently launched a new home study programme for the leaders and church members of all of our congregations. It covers a basic discipleship course, and includes a study book which we have bought, and supplementary worksheets that Gregory has written. Initially the uptake of the course was slow but more recently it has picked up. Gregory now has a pile of marking to do. While some of the folk clearly lack the language and study skills, others have done well. One of our members from the Samoa area filled two sides with questions and comments, and wrote a beautiful powerful and moving testimony of his own conversion.

As we have mentioned previously I have been doing some basic health education to our own church members at the women's Bible studies and at the monthly seminars. This teaching is greatly appreciated, and I thoroughly enjoy the opportunity. However the need is vast and I will only ever have a very small impact if I work exclusively within the Elim churches. At the end of last year I approached a local NGO that has a very active program in terms of HIV education and home based care. I asked if I could help them with training on a voluntary basis and they welcomed this offer. Their provincial health director asked me particularly to work with the pastors in Moatize equipping them to face the issue of HIV more effectively. He told me that in the past their efforts to encourage the pastors to engage with this issue had not met with much success. Well that was not an encouraging introduction and left me wondering where to start! I decided to test the water by including a slot on HIV at our January month-end seminar. The NGO invited all of the pastors in Moatize, and a good number of non-Elim pastors attended. The HIV slot was well received, and there seemed to be a genuine hunger for further teaching in this area. On the strength of that I am in the early stages of putting together a program for a three-day seminar which will be run under their umbrella rather than being an Elim event.

The road has not been smooth even in the short time since I first approached this group. The strongest part of their work is the home based care program run by a well trained and motivated army of 40 local volunteers. I have attended a couple of their meetings, and was making good progress in building a trusting relationship with the nurse who supervised the volunteers. Just two weeks ago I sat in on a training seminar the volunteers were having, and saw that the nurse was really very unwell. Sadly she died just 4 days later. I got the message of her death literally as I was picking up the car keys to go and pay her a visit. Such losses leave me feeling shocked and intensely angry. It brings home how very difficult it is to build a lasting work when you can lose your key people so very suddenly. An Indian doctor working in the Tete hospital has coined a phrase, "It is easy to die in Mozambique". The longer we live here the more we realize the truth of this saying. Scarcely a week goes by that we don't hear of a death - malaria, AIDS, road accidents, crocodiles - they all take their toll, killing disproportionate numbers of children and young adults. It is not a surprise that our rural churches are almost devoid of elderly members. Few people live to old age. We are determined not to give up, but to turn the anger into action and to seek to make a difference wherever we can.
 

Please Pray

Praise God that we finally secured suitable premises for our church in the centre of Tete Pray for the successful launch of a Portuguese service in the city centre Pray for great openness among the pastors to the launch of HIV training in Moatize Pray for the reconstruction work in the areas affected by the recent floods Continue to pray for our safety on the roads and for our general health Pray that many of our church members will complete the discipleship program and would grow in faith and understanding Continue to pray for the home schooling of our boys - for patience, wisdom and creativity for all concerned

Grace to you

Sharon and Gregory Kane

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Sharon's 'Joke of the Month'

* Toilet Repair *

Because I couldn't unplug the toilet with a plunger, I had to dismantle the entire fixture, no small feat for a non-plumber. Jammed inside the drain was a purple rubber dinosaur, which belonged to my five-year-old son.

I painstakingly got all the toilet parts together again, the tank filled, and I flushed it. However, it didn't work much better than before! As I pondered what to do next, my son walked into the bathroom. I pointed to the purple dinosaur I had just dislodged and told him that the toilet still wasn't working.

"Did you get the green one too?" he asked.