Family News
We are doing well as a family. I have finished a rather busy season and now look forward to being able to spend a bit more time with Naíme and the children. Sebastian, Stephen and Naimita all finished the school year well. So far we are pleased with the local public school where they attend. They have all had very good and caring teachers so far. Summer is challenging as we have to find ways to keep them all busy throughout the long summer days. We attempt to do something like a summer homeschool program with them. I participate in this and very much enjoy it. One of the benefits of this is to try to help them with their English which is hard for them to maintain when they have to study two other languages as well (Catalan and Spanish).
Naíme (my wife) is now about six months pregnant. It looks like we will be having another girl! The name we have chosen is Sofía (Sophia in Spanish) which means wisdom in Greek. Our children are excited that we will now be like the family from the Chronicles of Narnia with two boys and two girls. We appreciate your prayers for Naíme’s pregnancy.
Spanish Summers
We really like summers here. It does get hot and very humid, but the days are typically sunny and very long. Here in Spain many things really slow down in summer. People take their summer vacation at different times throughout the summer months. Our worship services start thinning out toward the end of July until mid September. Also some of our mid week activities adjourn until the start of the school year. All this means that my work load goes down a bit in summer. It is a great time to spend more time with the family, do some good reading, and work on projects in preparation for the coming year.
Evangelism Week
Last week we celebrated an “evangelism week” as some of you know. We would like to express our heart-felt thank to those of you who prayed for us. We are very pleased with how things went. Perhaps it would be good to describe what this week looked like. Basically we arranged to have two conference speakers come and address topics that we thought would be of interest to folks here in Vilassar as well as in Barcelona where David Barceló leads our church plant. Each speaker spoke twice, once in our church plant and once here in Vilassar. The first topic was why God allows pain and suffering and the second was a talk debunking different versions of Jesus out there such as the Da Vinci Code, Gospel According to Judas, etc. I am happy to be able to say that both talks were superb and very well received by those who came.
Having said that I should clarify that in Spain it is not enough to simply organize good talks if you expect people to come. People still have an aversion to stepping foot in an Evangelical church. As on other ocassions, we ran adds in a local magazine, distributed flyers and put up posters around town. We also arranged an interview with our local radio station to promote the event. We had done all this before, but the novelty was our book table in town. From Monday to Friday we set up a book table with books, DVDs and CDs that people could borrow. This table gave a good “presence” in town and apart from loaning out quite a few books we were able to hand out quite a few flyers to our talks.
I must say that there was quite a bit of work involved. But it was great to see how many people from our church and churchplant that got behind this event and helped in many different ways. One of the greatest benefits of doing something like this is for the local church itself. But we also praise the Lord that the talks were very well attended in both venues. There were new people in each of the talks and there was opportunity for some good conversations afterwards. One of the new couples actually came to church the next Sunday and the husband came to a small group Bible study I do on Wednesday mornings.
Prayer Requests & Praises
(1) Thanks to God for His help this past week and for the new people that came.
(2) Pray for Naíme’s pregnancy.
(3) Pray that the local government would grant us permission to set up our library in town on a regular basis. We have requested permission to set it up every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month which is open market day here in town.
(4) Pray for a productive summer for us as a family with Steve’s projects and our homeshooling attempts.
Thank you all for your prayers and support!
Steve and Naíme Phillips
Naíme (my wife) is now about six months pregnant. It looks like we will be having another girl! The name we have chosen is Sofía (Sophia in Spanish) which means wisdom in Greek. Our children are excited that we will now be like the family from the Chronicles of Narnia with two boys and two girls. We appreciate your prayers for Naíme’s pregnancy.
Spanish Summers
We really like summers here. It does get hot and very humid, but the days are typically sunny and very long. Here in Spain many things really slow down in summer. People take their summer vacation at different times throughout the summer months. Our worship services start thinning out toward the end of July until mid September. Also some of our mid week activities adjourn until the start of the school year. All this means that my work load goes down a bit in summer. It is a great time to spend more time with the family, do some good reading, and work on projects in preparation for the coming year.
Evangelism Week
Last week we celebrated an “evangelism week” as some of you know. We would like to express our heart-felt thank to those of you who prayed for us. We are very pleased with how things went. Perhaps it would be good to describe what this week looked like. Basically we arranged to have two conference speakers come and address topics that we thought would be of interest to folks here in Vilassar as well as in Barcelona where David Barceló leads our church plant. Each speaker spoke twice, once in our church plant and once here in Vilassar. The first topic was why God allows pain and suffering and the second was a talk debunking different versions of Jesus out there such as the Da Vinci Code, Gospel According to Judas, etc. I am happy to be able to say that both talks were superb and very well received by those who came.
Having said that I should clarify that in Spain it is not enough to simply organize good talks if you expect people to come. People still have an aversion to stepping foot in an Evangelical church. As on other ocassions, we ran adds in a local magazine, distributed flyers and put up posters around town. We also arranged an interview with our local radio station to promote the event. We had done all this before, but the novelty was our book table in town. From Monday to Friday we set up a book table with books, DVDs and CDs that people could borrow. This table gave a good “presence” in town and apart from loaning out quite a few books we were able to hand out quite a few flyers to our talks.
I must say that there was quite a bit of work involved. But it was great to see how many people from our church and churchplant that got behind this event and helped in many different ways. One of the greatest benefits of doing something like this is for the local church itself. But we also praise the Lord that the talks were very well attended in both venues. There were new people in each of the talks and there was opportunity for some good conversations afterwards. One of the new couples actually came to church the next Sunday and the husband came to a small group Bible study I do on Wednesday mornings.
Prayer Requests & Praises
(1) Thanks to God for His help this past week and for the new people that came.
(2) Pray for Naíme’s pregnancy.
(3) Pray that the local government would grant us permission to set up our library in town on a regular basis. We have requested permission to set it up every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month which is open market day here in town.
(4) Pray for a productive summer for us as a family with Steve’s projects and our homeshooling attempts.
Thank you all for your prayers and support!
Steve and Naíme Phillips
