One of our greatest desires as a church is to be able to reach and strengthen families. Especially here in Bolivia this is a great need because of the many broken and divided homes. Because of the lack of available work here several thousand people leave the country each month for countries abroad. Almost every family in our church has at least one family member many times a parent that is absent. Our desire is to be able to strengthen these families and help them know the only one who can give them peace.
This past February 18th – 21st we had our first family conference at our church. We had several special guests with Bro. Austin Gardner as the special speaker and his son Chris and four other visitors from Peru. Finally all the flyers were past out, all the preparations were made and everything else was left in the Lord’s hands. What we didn’t know while planning the conference was that this very week is one of the biggest celebrations in Bolivia and South America called Carnival where there are many parties, parades and lots of drinking. Also, the custom is that on every street there are hundreds of people with water balloons ready to soak any passers by. In spite of any of these possible difficulties the Lord worked in a great way. Our attendance on Sunday was 73 for both services, with our highest attendance on Monday of almost 90 people. We had in total 29 visitors and several professions of faith. It was very impacting to hear people say that they never knew that the Bible taught how to better and have success in your marriage and family. Our goal now is to follow up on those visitors many of which were visiting for the first time.
