Hello brothers and sisters,
we hope your beginning of the year was a blessing and a start of a new year with God. We know this year started with challenges and tribulations, but we trust God is in control and He can use us through these hard times to bless people and share about Him in this moment of darkness to many.
Church Ministry
Our church is doing good, praise the Lord, it’s with time growing and God is bringing new people to it. We continue to serve in whatever we can, Stefan is still in charge of the multimedia and Mariana is in charge of the worship team, and we both are in charge of the youth group.
We were able to do some upgrades for the sound system of our church that was much needed, now we can better worship the Lord as a church and with a better sound.
Stefan also had the opportunity to preach in our church on the passage of 1 Timothy 3:1-5, which talks about something that is a reality to our world today, of people that are lovers of the world more than God and those people are in our churches pretending to be Christians and Paul tell us that we should have nothing to do with such people. If you want to watch the preaching you can do so here: https://youtu.be/H3qqfpNfqQY
Youth Group
Our youth group continues strong, we now had to go back to the online meetings because the number had raised in Portugal, but we hope to soon go back to meeting in person.
We continue studying the book of Galatians with them and we gave the opportunity to one of our youth called João to also share a message in one of our meetings. Our focus is to continue to train two of them to in the future be youth leaders and continue the ministry with the youth in our church.
Prayer Requests
We are grateful for your prayers and for partnering with us in our ministry. Here are our prayer requests:
- Ministry in Portugal – pray that God can keep using us for His glory and that we persevere even when is hard.
- 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 in your heart to be partners with us in this ministry.
- Auto-immune Disease – after some tests we found out that 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.
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.