October 2008 Update

Greetings to you all!

The Family
Naíme is still hanging in there with her pregnancy. She is about 3 weeks shy of her due date and doing as well as can be expected given her circumstances. Her fibroids give her quite a bit of pain at times, but she is thankfully she is hanging in there. Needless to say she is ready to welcome Sofía into this world. We appreciate your continued prayers for mama and baby. I should add that many friends have offered us things like strollers and baby clothing that is just slightly used. This has been a tremendous blessing!

The children are back in school. Naíme is in the equivalent of kindergarten. Stephen is in 2nd and Sebastian in 3rd. Once again we are happy with all or their teachers. So far our public school has been a good experience and we have been impressed with the teachers. Just recently we read an article in a local paper about the state of public education in Catalonia that was not very encouraging. According to this article, schools in Catalonia and especially public schools are fairing very poorly compared to the rest of Europe and compared to local private schools. Reading this article made me think that we have not only a spiritual responsibility to work with our children at home, but also an academic one.

Outreach
Although it has been a while, I wanted to share a bit about our evangelism week back in July. As some of might remember, we had a special week of evangelism both here in Vilassar as well as in Sant Andreu. What we did was to schedule 2 conferences (the same in both venues) about topics we thought would be of interest to folks here. The first conference was about how a good God can allow suffering and the second was rebuttal of some of the popular versions of Jesus (like the DaVinci Code). In Vilassar we also set up a book table and lent books & CDs to people as well as passed out a bunch of invitations to the conferences. The great thing is that there were new people in all of these conferences. And here in Vilassar there is a couple that has started attending church regularly as a result of the conferences. I should say that they are not only attending church but any and all activities that have. I laugh as I write this because the wife comes to my English class and last Wednesday the husband came with her (without any prompting) to fix some of our wooden chairs that needed repair.

Our outreach through English classes is up and running again. When we sent back to the U.S. last December I was able to share with some of you our vision for doing outreach inspired in part by a verse in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 29:7 says, “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” It was with this vision that we started offering free English classes last year. I should add that while the classes are free we do encourage students to give donations in order to help us cover our costs. Our first year was a bit of a rough ride in some ways, but it was a great learning experience. We offered 2 classes last year and finished with approximately 8 students between the two classes.

This year it looks like we might have more like 22 students plus a small waiting list of people who would like to study with us but who cannot come to the classes we currently offer. Just about all of our students live here in town and are Catalonians. We are thankful for this opportunity to build relationships with new people. I am also creating a blog called “The English Project” to help get the word out (http://vilassarenglishproject.blogspot.com/). Please pray with us that these classes would lead to friendships and opportunities to share the Gospel with our students.


Thanks again for your prayers and support!
Steve & Naíme Phillips