The end of February is very near already. We pray that you all had a great Christmas and New Year’s. Ours were both good. We enjoyed our Christmas service. It’s always fun to be together as a church family on Christmas. It was a little different with it being on a Sunday; we had a shortened service. New Year’s was good as well. We didn’t have an all-nighter like we normally have. We decided to change it up and give everyone the option to be home with friends and family to ring in the New Year.
Ministry
We thank God that we had a wonderful opportunity for ministry last year, and we are looking forward to what God will have us do this year. The fact that we get to serve Him, witness to folks, and have the privilege to disciple is an honor. We were able to go to Kenya a few weeks back, more specifically, Nairobi. There is another missionary there by the name of Charles Newton. He is also with FBMI, and he started Faith Baptist Church roughly nine months ago. They were having their first Missions Conference, and I had the privilege of being their main speaker. I took my wife and a few men from our church. What an exciting new ministry it is. The people are new Christians, who are growing and having fun. Nairobi is very different from Morogoro, so it was neat to be able to enjoy some pleasures from the very developed city. We were also able to “hang out” with a few members from Team East Africa. What a blessing it was to see them and to hear about the different things God is doing through them.
We also had our Valentine’s Banquet. We had 68 people attend. We rented out a beautiful conference hall at one of the hotels here and were honored to have Pastor Tingson and his wife come speak and share with our people about how to strengthen their marriages. We started out all together with games and teaching. Then we went to a split session, followed by more games, lunch, and then the final session. We know that Satan is always trying to destroy the church, and he starts with marriages to attack families and so on. So we try to teach the importance of guarding and fighting for your marriage.
The regular ministries are going well too. Bus, school, Sunday school, Junior Church, and Wednesday Bible time. We are grateful for all of the workers, the prayers, and the effort put into the daily or weekly ministries. Thank you all for your prayer and financial support so we can do these things.
Buildings
We have finished up the last of our building projects for now. The village church in Giaro has the roof on and is now meeting in their new church building. At their Grand Opening, they had 60 in attendance, and they were so excited. We were able to talk with them via WhatsApp for a few minutes to congratulate them; however, due to the very poor signal, we didn’t get to talk for long. We also finished the building in Mikese. They started meeting there was well. They were grateful and excited to have their own place for Thursday nights, which is when their midweek service is.
Thank you all again for the cards, emails, notes, etc. Thank you for keeping in touch with us. Please let us know if you ever have any email changes; we try to keep our prayer-letter list as updated as possible.
For His glory,
Mshama, Martha, Esther, Benjamin, Rachel, & Sarah Kinyonga
