MINISTRY UPDATE

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Hello friends,

This past month has been very busy starting with the Student Leadership Retreat followed some visitors from Texas and 2 short-term mission teams. This week is Graduation week for the kindergarten, elementary school and Junior High. It’s been a great month of ministry!

The Student Leadership Retreat’s wake is still strong. The four leaders have prepared a day camp for the new students who will be entering the youth group this summer and are taking on leadership roles in and out of church amongst the youth. We are so proud of them, the chemistry is incredible. We had a movie night with the leaders (a part of the retreat that we didn’t do) a couple days ago watching and discussing the film, Remembering the Titans. What an inspirational movie about team unity and leadership!

We also had some visitors from Houston, Texas come down to hang out during their Senior Trip! Yes, for their Senior Trip they wanted to come to Cofradía! These are some friends from Cy-Fair Christian Church who have been very instrumental in building relationships with the people of this area, mainly the youth. They were down in March as a Short-Term Mission team as they have done for the past four years and came down again this June for “vacation.” It was a lot of fun and our youth really enjoy it when they come.

We only had two Short-term Mission teams this summer. The first one was a group of adults and a few students from Colorado who are really interested in the outreach to the Cora Indians that live close to us in the hills. They worked very closely with missionary Jay TenBrink as he heads up that ministry. One of the villages they visited to hand out care packages was Agua Aceda, a village I used to go to weekly. It was great to see some old friends and I was really impressed to see that some were still walking with the Lord, reading their Bibles and praying! The little kids that always gathered around me as we sang songs are now the youth in that village and a number of them have expressed interest in being part of the youth group and going to camp. It’s interesting how God works; I never realized how our efforts of 10 years ago could have an impact today.

The second team was from Washington who comes down every two years. They went around to different villages to do Evangelistic outreaches in the centers of towns. I did my best to hang in there, but I was not feeling well the whole time they were here. Thanks to Jay, he covered for me on Friday night, I just could not sing because of a sore throat and bad head-ache. The report from our students was very good on how they were able to make friends with the Americans on the team.

As for our family, we have not done so well with our health this month. As I mentioned, I wasn’t feeling well for a week, really, I’ve been extremely tired physically and needed a couple days rest. Rebecka has had a cough for a couple of weeks and Emma was not feeling well either running a very high temperature. Geña has been doing very well and hasn’t been sick at all and has been very busy with a number of different things. At the moment she’s making a costume for Rebecka for the Kindergarten Graduation which will be on Friday the 6th. In Mexico, Kindergarten is two years. This is Rebecka’s first year, she still has one more year left and will be giving the farewell speech to the students who will be graduating.

Thank you for continuing to pray for our family and ministry. Prayer is SO IMPORTANT! Please pray for…

· Rebecka to not be shy or afraid to give her farewell speech (July 6)
· Julio and Mili who will be at a Bible Camp for five weeks (July 9-August 11)
· The Day Camp that the student leaders are putting together for the new students (July 11)
· A FOR YOUTH night which will be the first youth event with the new students. For Youth is just a hang out fun night with games, activities, food and making new friends (July 13).
· A youth soccer tournament that reaches out to unreached students, helps others in the leadership roles, and brings different towns together (July 17-21)
· Our youth band who has been invited to do worship at a youth rally in another town (July 28)
· Youth Summer Camp (July 31-August 4)
· The preparation of some evangelistic outreaches our youth will do in other towns (August)
· Finances for Jose Luis and Ricardo who will be going to a YWAM DTS in September, they need a minimum of $2500 each and have not received any donations yet.

Blessings to you all!
The Silbermans