Last weekend was a long one and saw our second annual Elder-Link take place. This three day event is a ministry aimed at helping with one of the church’s greatest needs in Northeast Brazil. Of the 135 congregations in this vast region of Brazil only three have elderships. May God help us to have mature leadership in all the congregations!

Everything at the Elder-Link seemed to go well. We followed a 40 days of prayer plan leading up to the event, which probably explains it’s going so smoothly. There were 56 participants (most of them couples) representing 14 congregations. This does not include the ladies that came to work in the kitchen.

We were pleased by these numbers even though they were down from the first one last year. There were 72 at that one. However, lasts year’s event was for all of Northeast Brazil. The plan this year was for each section of the region to have its own Elder-link meeting. Next year we will go back to a region-wide event and then rotate back and forth on alternating years. Fortaleza (500 miles North) will have their Elder-Link in a month on a long weekend in October. Last year 22 came down from there to the event in Recife as well as carloads from other cities.

The last two Elder-links were held at the church in Lar Mana– a home for children, which currently has 29 kids. On Sunday morning all of the kids and their house parents met with the Elder-Link group for church assembly. Aureni and I got to sit and play with the kids (trying to keep them quiet) all throughout church. I haven’t heard so much noise in church since I was a kid myself. I must confess that it was one of the high points of the event for me. May God bless those children!