Our Inauguration Service

Well, we made it! We had our last meeting in our borrowed facilities Sunday, May 21. You can see the crowd we had that day.

We have just put in days of intense work getting our building (almost) ready for the inauguration service. The workmen on the crew finish their part on Friday night at 11:00 pm. They didn't get everything done, but we had some bathrooms and some lights. Everyone available had been painting and sanding furiously for days. On Saturday morning others of the church people came in and did heavy cleaning.

We've been helped by the team from Calvary Baptist in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. They arrived on Friday morning and by Friday afternoon were getting the drywall up for the nursery. The worked Saturday morning while cleaning was going on all around them. We were able to use the nursery for the first service. We had 15 babies!

The service itself began at 7:00 on Saturday night. We had 200+ chairs and anticipated a few people perhaps standing up. We set up a children service upstairs between the studs for the drywall.

All 200+ chairs were filled, approximately 185 people stood and we had a number outside the door listening. Pastor Lasley from our home church, Buffalo Ridge in Gray, Tennesse, preached.

Here is Pastor Lasley (2nd from left) with three pastors of our previous churches and Jeff Traver, our co-worker.














On Monday Preacher Lasley spoke to our area preachers. It was a great meeting. His message was, "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?" The Lord used it in a special way. Here's a picture of the pastors.


Lord bless, Graham and René Foran

The Race to the Finish Line

It is a busy time for us as we head toward furlough and try to get into our new church building. We have a three story building set on a 600 square meter lot. We will be using the first two stories and leaving the third story to finish later. Here's the latest picture. We are frantically doing everything possible to have it useable for the 27th of May when Pastor Gene Lasley will preach our inauguration service. The date was set months ago and I decided we'd have an inauguration no matter what the state of the building was!

Right now, São Paulo is in the midst of a big panic due to the actions of the PCC, a large criminal gang which began in the prisons. There have been dozens of police killed in the last four days and over 40 prison revolts and today, the city shut down due to fear. Mostly exaggerated, the gang is not that big, but rumors fly and soon everyone was closing up shop. Once that started, even the people who didn't believe the rumors had to shut down. There were no customers!

It is calm around here. Most of the violence is directed at policemen. The number of attacks has diminished drastically since Sunday and the only number going up is the number of criminal killed. It seems obvious that a lot of the ones they catch will be killed "resisting arrest". A lot of police were buried over the weekend.

Lord bless,

Graham, René and Katie Foran