Changes are around the corner

Hello brothers and sisters,
we hope you are doing well! Welcome to our newsletter website, where we will be posting ministry and life updates. This is where you can find our prayer requests and how to contact us. Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter.

Ministry Updates

Ministry in the church continues strong, every Sunday we see new faces at church that warms our hearts. We are creating a schedules and are training new people to be in charge of multimedia and worship in the future. Stefan also had the opportunity to preach in church on Sunday and in one of our prayer meetings.
Our youth group continues to meet every Saturday in person, sometimes can be difficult to work with youth because the world keeps pushing them away from God, but we pray that we can have perseverance and give our best to be a good testimony to them and bring the truth of the gospel to their lives.
Our church also made in the month of March a church retreat, and we could serve organizing the whole sound and multimedia of the retreat, leading worship, and taking pictures. Mari also had the opportunity to translate the testimony of Viktoria, a Ukrainian Christian that is staying in Mariana’s parents’ house. Her whole family had to stay in Ukraine because of the war.

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Big changes are coming

We would like to officially announce that we are moving to Serbia this summer. After much prayer and thought, we saw that God was leading us to move back to Serbia, Stefan’s seminary classes are back to being in person and we know many churches there are in need of a pastor as well.
We know the need is big in Portugal but is also in Serbia and in many places. God was opening the doors for us to move back and bringing people that can continue the ministry we are doing here in Portugal, we knew that now was the moment.
We are going to be living in a town in the north called Subotica, next to the border with Hungary. Stefan didn’t learn Hungarian for nothing, haha, and he will be using it a lot there. That are also two churches there with no pastor and in great need, so we will be helping them.

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Trip to the north

In May we had the opportunity to do a trip to the north to visit friends and visit a church in a city called Vila Real for possible future partnership. We had the opportunity to bring a friend with us from Word of Life Hungary called Daniel. He was spending a couple of days with us, Daniel, Stefan, and Filipe that is in the picture with them, were in the same dorm in Bible School.

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Prayer requests

We are grateful for your prayers and for partnering with us in our ministry. Here are our prayer requests:

• Moving to Serbia – pray for our move to Serbia and that God can keep using us for His glory wherever we are.
• Youth of Our Church – pray that the youth can come to a real encounter with Christ and that they can see the importance of the youth group, and for those that are saved to keep growing in their relationship with God.
• Language learning – pray for Stefan as he is learning Portuguese and for Mari as she is learning Serbian.
• Support Raising – pray that God will continue to provide for us. We continue in the process of raising support so that we can work full-time in the ministry. Right now we have 5% raised. Pray as well if God is putting on your heart to be partners with us in this ministry. Stefan has to work on the side to be able to support our financial needs, but we would love to be able to focus full-time on the ministry. At the moment, since Stefan has to work on the side, all our support goes directly to the needs of the church and ministry since we have enough money for all the bills for now, but we are still praying that in the future we will have enough support to go full-time ministry as we continue to give all our needs before the Lord!
• Auto-immune Disease – as you know Stefan has a chronicle disease called Ulcerative Colitis, there is no cure but it can be controlled. Pray that the medication will keep it dormant for the rest of his life and that he won’t have big problems with that in the future.
• Mari’s family – Mari’s grandpa passed away at the begging of the month. Praise the Lord that he was a Christian and is now with the Lord, but pray for her dad and grandma, especially, that is mourning the loss of her husband.

Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter. 
Please let us know how we can be praying for you!

God bless, 

Stefan and Mariana Vika.