Dear partners in prayer and support!
These last two months have been exciting and full of ministry opportunities! Part of our responsibility as missionaries is to disciple believers in sharing the gospel. We are thrilled to evangelize through our efforts but we know that it is not only through our preaching that Jesus's gospel will change lives. It is also, and most importantly through the preaching of the gospel by all the believers in France that widespread revival can take place. These past two months we focused on this area of growth.
Starting in mid-September, we led an evangelism and laïcité seminar with some of the church members. Once a week for six weeks, we taught evangelism in the French context of laïcité (a legal and cultural principle that hinders public evangelism) and how believers could learn to evangelize amid this pressure. It was a great time of fellowship and growth in evangelism for the participants and all participants shared the gospel regularly during the six weeks and were accountable to the rest of the group. This allowed some young believers to jump the step and share the gospel for the first time. Pray that the fire for evangelism that was started in these hearts would continue to burn and yield fruit.
We also had a special outreach opportunity with the church. We met a fellow Baptist believer from Ukraine a few months ago. From our conversations with him, we gathered that he had a strong desire to reach fellow Ukrainians in the refugee camp. With the language barrier, we had no opportunity to share the gospel with these people, but meeting Vladimir offered us the opportunity to reach these people for Christ. Our church people gave bags full of first necessity goods to give to all the refugees that would come to listen to the gospel shared by Vladimir and myself. We had almost fifty refugees attend and the gospel was shared in Ukrainian by Vladimir and myself with the help of a translator. New Testaments and coloring books with Bible stories were given to each family so that the Word of God could be implanted in these people's hearts. Pray that God might reach some of these people through the efforts our church made for the salvation of these Ukrainian refugees.
Pray that God would continue to work in the hearts of our people so that they might continue to grow in their faithfulness to the Lord. Evangelism is not a new concept for our people but it was necessary that we continue the efforts to help the French believers in their evangelism.
We also saw a couple in our church get married on the 8th of September and rejoiced with them in their new union. And we were able to help an elderly lady in our church with her moving, this was encouraging as many people from the church took the time to come and help her.
Please continue to pray for us and for our church as well as for the many unbelievers that we are in contact with!
Thank you for your prayers and support!
Jonathan and Priscilla Laase
Your voices to the French Dear partners in prayer and support!