Good morning friends,

I really appreciate each one of you who is praying for us so steadily.

A quick review, we are a team of 5 Tanzanians, 1 Mexican, and 3 Americans who are making disciples, starting house churches, and loving the neighbors who live around our house.

We’ve been doing our best to make disciples among all age groups. 3 members of our team, Cassidy Barker, Dinnah Sylvester, and Nancy Martinez, have a special calling for children. They wanted to make disciples with children, but they weren’t sure where to start. It seemed harder, somehow, for a child to understand the idea of changing her life, turning away from selfishness and deciding to live a life of love. It seemed harder for a child to be able to make a long-term decision and stick with it. So we weren’t quite sure what to do.

We didn’t want to let that hold us back though; we decided to just try something, though we weren’t quite sure what we were doing. If it didn’t work, we would learn from it. We started a kids group, meeting on Monday nights at 8, hoping that it might one day become a house church. We kept it very simple at the beginning; just singing a song and teaching a Bible story.

For a while, it looked like it wouldn’t go too far. So we comforted ourselves by saying that the kids were learning about the Bible, which was a good start. Then, when they got older, they could remember what we taught them, and they might change their lives and start living like Jesus. We were just happy on the weeks when they paid attention and didn’t turn the Bible story into a joke.

But slowly, we were pleasantly surprised as they started to take it more seriously. One girl, 11 years old, started to take a leadership role. We noticed this, and then one Monday night when we were on a break, this girl led the group to meet. We hadn’t even told her to! That was encouraging.

Here are pictures of the first weeks of the children meeting:

Then one week, this girl accidentally went to a meeting of one of the house churches that we had started. She saw the adults reading the Bible, teaching each other about it, praying for each other, and then making promises about how they would change their lives to live more like Jesus.

I guess she told all of the other kids, because the next week, when we showed up for the kids group, they had some demands. “Why don’t we make promises in our group? Why don’t we pray for each other’s needs?”

We responded, “You have a lot of heart. You know it’s not a game, making a promise in front of God every week. It means you have to keep the promise, you know. Are you ready? Are all of you ready?”

It took a couple weeks, but they decided that they were all ready. So we allowed them to turn the kids group into a house church meeting. They worship. They pray for each other. They read the Bible, and then they teach each other what they learned from the passage. Then, everyone makes a promise about how they will live out the passage in the coming week; a promise before God about how they will change their lives.

We were really touched when several of them promised to meet some homeless kids and help them. We wanted to support them, and I knew from a couple years of working with homeless kids in Tarime that these homeless children are bitter, tough and mean. It wasn’t something to rush into. So this last Saturday, we hosted everyone at our house. We invited a few hand-picked homeless children, who weren’t quite as bitter, and we invited the children from the house church. We prepared food for everyone, so that this could be a time for them to meet each other, so that the kids from the house church could hear from the homeless kids about what they need. It was a happy time. It’s good to see a little of the kingdom of God here on earth. The title means “the heart of a child”.