January 2022 Prayer Letter

Good Day from the Murray Family,

We trust you are doing well and hope you had a wonderful Christmas.  We were so thankful to have once again been able to spend another holiday with our families here in the states.  

Christmastime brought more opportunity to serve and be a blessing in various communities in Bolivia. We were able to help all three of our churches have a special Christmas celebration for the children.  We also helped in three additional churches and outreaches.  While I don't have a full report from each church, I know we helped to feed over 300 people, mostly children.  The meals varied from chicken to hotdogs and each child received a small Christmas gift as well.  We greatly appreciate the help from a couple of our supporting churches and Change the World Relief Organization that made this special Christmas blessing possible.

Our churches in Bolivia, just like here in the states, are seeing fluctuating attendance due to an increase of Covid cases. Just before Christmas, our new outreach was seeing some consistent growth.  Each week Brother Arturo would message me that their 60 chairs were not enough.  At first, I thought it was due to some special program or service that attracted extra visitors and that the attendance would soon return to normal.  This continued for several weeks so we purchased more chairs, and we did so just in time.  They saw 150 people attend the Christmas meal and they had just enough chairs!

This same outreach recently had to divide up the children's class.  All the children were being taught in one large class due to lack of help.  However, at the beginning of the year, that large class was divided according to age.  We now have 2 children's classes!  This seemingly small thing is a step in the right direction because it allows more people to be involved in the ministry.  Brother Arturo's family had been the only ones teaching up to this point, but now we have at least one other helper and a second who we are hoping will soon begin to help as well.  What a blessing to see not only numerical growth in this outreach but also spiritual growth.  Despite Covid becoming more widespread than ever in Bolivia, the Lord is working while seeing this church through these trying times!

I want to update you on the land project.  We are still pressing forward with our goal of buying property and starting construction for this growing outreach. We have had to change some of our meetings due to weather and sickness in the scheduled churches (thankfully none in our family so far). We are excited to be within $5,000 of that goal.  We are grateful to all the churches and individuals who have helped us so far.  

Lastly, we are glad to be able to report that the first of our two scripture containers has finally been unloaded in Bolivia!  This has been a much longer process than our last container, but we are excited to see 17 pallets of scripture portions and over 3 million tracts available for sharing the gospel across Bolivia and South America!  Please continue to pray for the 2nd container which will bring in more scripture portions and 5 pallets of full Bibles.

Thank you to all who have helped make this past year of ministry possible.  We believe God has done great things for His honor and glory.  We look forward to seeing what God has in store for Bolivia throughout this new year!