Jim and Phyllis Childress Missionaries to Panama since 1976
jimchildress777@gmail.com
10 August 2011
Dear Faithful Rope Holders,
The medical clinic in July is now history and we left a lot of work for Brother Hernandez to with many people seeking more information on the church and others inviting him to visit their community. During the clinic we had just over 750 patients with over 300 professions of faith, with people coming from at least 16 different communities, some of which were 5 hours away.
This month we had our annual pastor/missionary couples and singles retreat and it was a very good re-treat. My sending pastor was supposed to come but could not make it since he had to have a pace-maker and defibrillator implanted just a week before the retreat. Pastor Robinson decided to send his assistant, Bill Bender with his wife, Lynette. They did a tremendous job of encouraging our missionaries, pastors and their wives.
The Bible Baptist Church of San Antonio is marching along at a good pace. We managed to sell our buses this month. One of our men worked diligently to get one bus running and the other was still untouched. We managed to sell them for $9,000 after putting about $700 into one of the buses and we would no doubt have had to invest more money in several things, including four tires. The men voted to sell them before the guy could change his mind.
The money from the buses went into our building fund that we set up since we arrived. That now gives us $15,000 in our building fund and my goal is to have $20,000 by January. We still have about $4,000 in the general fund and we may be able to add another $1,000 by the end of August. Our goal is to have $20,000.00 by Christmas. The people are very encouraged that we finally have money in the building fund after giving to the building fund for years and finding out after I got there that we had nothing in the building fund.
Brother Angel is a real blessing and Satan has put him through the fire since he decided to live as a Christian. He was saved a number of years ago but never got into church. He now has several of his children coming to church and gave testimony tonight which included the fact that he may lose his job soon. Pray for Angel and Christina.
We are sowing the seed for building a new sanctuary on our lot, but we have to wait until we get more legal work straightened out. The church has two houses and two lots and none of them were ever titled in the name of the church when they should have been. That has created complications. The lawyer has informed us that the progress is slow but things are happening. We will be taking it one step at a time. Once we have the four properties legalized, we will combine them into one partial and then look at the next legal step and what it will take to start building a new sanctuary. We have room to build a 45 by 60 building and I hope to do the work in stages. Please pray for all of this.
My boat motor has died again and it is time to bury it. Between the two motors, we hope to make one good motor. I will leave that motor with one of the churches on the coast and I will need to buy two bigger motors for my boat.
Fishing and feeding, The sacrificial gifts of $ given in May, June and July.
Jim