 |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
I trust you are well. This note is to please remember me in your prayers a little more. On September 3, I had my regular six month cat-scan and the doctors noticed that the remaining thyroid gland is swollen and has nodules or zists on it. They proceede in taking a sample with needles to do a biopsy two days ago and I will know the results on the 23rd. If you would like to call me on that day to know the results, my cel phone number is: 011-507-6501-7595. Please pray all is well. Thank you and God bless you,. In His Service, Byron Willis |
||||||||||
We have been averaging around 600 to 700 people in our church for the past four years. We have two services on Sunday mornings, two children's churches and over 35 Sunday School classes in, behind, and in front of our building. Our auditorium is around 85% full every time we have a service. We need to buy around two acres to be able to build a 600 seat auditorium and have the offices and classrooms we need. The land in the picture above has almost two acres and it is located only one block from the main street in downtown David. The land is valued here at over $700,000.00 and we have nothing close to that amount, but we are praying God will give us this land. Humanly speaking, there is no way we can afford to do this as a church, but we know we have a mighty God who will provide. Please pray God will provide us with the property and the building we need to keep on growing in attendance.
We have FOUR BUSES which were given to us that are still in Tennessee. It will cost us at least $4,000.00 to get each bus to Panama. We have sold one bus and we need to see another one so we can have the money to bring the other four down. Once we have our new building we will need to have at least 14 buses for all the routes we run. Our GIRL'S HOME turned three years old on Sep. 29 and
we have over 25 girls and children in the home! In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
It has been a wild three months! We trust that you have had a great a time as God has given us here in Panama these past three months. We thank you so much for your faithful giving that allows us to invest our money in the Lord's work so that we can be doing all that God has allowed us to do these past three months. Sorry for not writing sooner, but I have just not stopped long enough to do so, and anyone that has been with me will agree. The LADIES CONFERENCE was in the month of May and my
wife always does a great job organizing this conference. We had a Pastor's
wife from California come and speak to the ladies and she (Mrs. Salazar)
was a wonderful blessing. There were over 500 ladies in attendance and
most of these ladies were from our own area. The MENS CONFEENCE was in
the month of June just a few days before Father's Day. A Hispanic Pastor
from Florida came to preach. We had over 300 men attend this Conference
and 75 men were saved and 35 were baptized. I wish we had as many men
as we have ladies, but at least we had more salvations and baptisms…Ha!
We have FOUR BUSES which were given to us that are still in Tennessee. It will cost us at least $4,000.00 to get each bus to Panama. Pray we can sell two of the buses we have here so we can have the money to bring the other four down. Once we have our new building we will need to have at least 14 buses for all the routes we run. Our BIBLE COLLEGE is half way through the year and we have at least four graduates this year. Pray for them!
In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
Thank you so much for taking time to read this letter. We trust you are doing fine in spite of the difficult economic times many of you are going through. We thank you for your faithfulness in giving to missions during these hard times. We are doing well and God has been blessing our ministries in wonderful ways. Our Bible College is doing well. We do need at least 10 LAPTOP COMPUTERS for our computer class. If you would like to send a good laptop computer which we could use to train these young men and women for the ministry, please do so by mailing it to the following address: Byron Willis; PTY 5023; P.O. BOX 025207; MIAMI, FL, 33102. If you mail a computer to this address make sure you put the value on the outside of the box because we will have to pay the duty on it. We have to pay for the shipping and duty on each package. If you would rather send us money to buy one down here, just send it to our home church and designate it for a computer. On Easter Sunday we had almost 1,000 people in church with a good group of people getting saved and baptized. So far this year we are doing well trying to reach the goals we have set for the year. We have had over 1,350 people saved out soul-winning, 282 professions of faith in our services, and 125 new converts have been baptized from January through April. Our attendance is consistent and we see the Lord giving us more and more faithful folks in our ministry every week. Pray we may have more and more Sunday School teachers for over 35 classes we have. Panama now has a new President. Pray that this new President may open many more doors to reach more folks with the Gospel. This president is a good friend of the USA and we hope God blesses Panama more than ever for their decision to elect a conservative, anti-socialist man for their president. The Girl's home/Orphanage is doing well. We have between 25 to 30 girls and children in this home at any given time. Pray we may be able to open a home exclusively for children and dedicate the girl's home specifically for girls with unwanted pregnancies. Also pray for the feeding centers we run, feeding over 150 children daily. This month we have a Ladies Conference and in June we will be celebrating a Men's Conference. Please pray we may be able to reach many more folks for Christ through these conferences. We held a Youth Conference in April and had an attendance of over 300 teens in our services, with many getting saved and baptized. We have been given up to three more buses to bring to Panama but it costs us around $4,000.00 to get each one here. Please pray we may raise the funds to bring more buses to Panama so that more people may be reached. Thank you for your prayers and support. You gift (investment)
is never taken lightly. God bless you richly. In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
We have been so busy since January 1st that I have not had an opportunity to get this 2008 report to you. We did have a great year and we thank God for each and every one of you that has a part in keeping us on the Field, reaching others for Christ. We trust you are all doing well and seeing the blessings of God in your life. THE MAIN CHURCH: Our Church in David had a good year. We saw close to 900 people make public professions of faith in our services and we had close to 200 people follow the Lord in believers' baptism. Our people won, on average, around 50 souls to Christ every week through our soul-winning programs and we had around 80 people out sharing the gospel with others every week. We had a high day of over 1,250 this year and we have seen our Sunday School grow to over 30 classes every Sunday morning. Our offerings have been up. Our people are learning to give more and more every year. Our people gave around $3,500.00 a month in tithes and they gave $800.00 a month to Missions. Please pray our folks will grow in this area of giving. We need much more income to do more to grow more. THE BIBLE COLLEGE had a good year with 15 students and three of them graduated in December. We appreciate all the help we received for the Bible College which was a great blessing in our ministry. Our graduates are serving the Lord both here in our church, abroad, and preparing to start new works. THE GIRLS HOME: We finally achieved the certification we needed from the government and since then they have begun sending us girls and babies. The home has grown to maximum capacity on numerous occasions. We have seen many babies lives saved from abortion and many girls lives transformed by the saving power of God. THE FEEDING CENTERS: All four of the feeding centers we run did well this year and we fed, on average, 160 children two meals a day, five days a week. Please pray these centers will keep on growing and that these children may become great Christians. We thank God for MANNA Worldwide (www.mannaworldwide.com) for sending us support to run the Girls Home and Feeding Centers. OTHER WORKS: The other works we are involved in are doing well. Our missionary in El Salvador is building his building and working hard, Bro. Rafael Rodriguez is doing a great job in the town of Dolega, and the church that I started when I was 16 years old is still going strong in the small town in El Valle. We also have College graduates from our Church serving the Lord in the States, Mexico and Africa. OUR GOALS for 2009 are to reach over 5,000 people for
the Lord through personal soul winning, over 2,500 people saved in our
services and over 500 people baptized. So far in January and February
we have had over 800 people saved, over 200 professions of faith and over
68 people baptized. 19 Bible clubs were able to reach over 1,200 children.
We had two camps this summer with over 130 kids attending. Thank you for
your prayers and your support. May God richly bless you and your ministry.
In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
We hope and pray that this Christmas season brings you much joy and blessings from the Lord. December is always a very busy month in the country of Panama. In December we celebrate Mothers Day (8th), end of the school year (March-December), Graduations, Christmas and New Years Eve, and it does not stop there for us, because the first Sunday of the year is our churches' anniversary. This year we will be celebrating our Sixteenth anniversary. Thank you so much for the special offerings in December which always help us cover all of the extra expenses during this busy time. At the time that this letter is being put into the mail we have already celebrated five Christmas parties, and we have a few more to go. We have four feeding centers, the girls home, the church and we also have a party for all of the preachers and their families here in our fellowship. My wife does a great job shopping and buying gifts for over 200 children (clothing), and that does not include our immediate family. Our church saves up more than $1,200.00 to buy gifts for over 350 children in our church, and we also have a Sunday where we give away bags of "goodies" to over 500 children. The months of October and November were very fruitful. We started by having our annual Patriotic Sunday on the last Sunday of October. We invited five high school marching bands to come to our church on this Sunday morning, and we formed our own parade with our Sunday School classes and these bands. After the parade was finished all of the members of the bands were invited to come into the auditorium and listen to the Preaching, receive their prizes, and feed them lunch. Our church people could not fit in the auditorium with them, so we had closed circuit television for them to see. Over 350 young people were in the auditorium and over 150 stood up in the invitation and received Christ as their personal Lord and Savior! Praise the Lord! We also had a two day outreach after the parades in downtown David and we had over 40 people saved in this activity. On November 30, we invited the Fire Department to come to our church, but the day the fire truck was to come we had a constant rain, day and night. The fire truck did not come but the band from the Fire Department did. They played patriotic and Christmas songs for the congregation and afterwards we fed them lunch and witnessed to them. Over 30 members of the Fire Department trusted in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. All of this is possible thanks to your faithful support. On November 15 we had our third College Graduation and three students graduated! Praise the Lord! We held our annual Family Conference in November with over 400 in the evenings. Pastor Minge from Washington State came to preach! What a blessing He and his people were to our folks! We had over 250 people saved in our services in November! Your support keeps us going and doing more and more. In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
We have had a couple of great months and God has blessed us in wonderful ways. We trust the Lord gave you a great summer and a relaxing time with your family. We invite you to come to visit us for one of your vacations. There are great hotels here in Chiriqui and we have, beside the many good churches and ministries, beautiful mountains and beaches. Panama is a very safe country to travel in and the costs are only a fraction of costs in the States. There are many Americans moving to Panama taking advantage of the affordable living, the kind people, and the friendly government. Come and see us. My wife organized our Ladies' Conference in the month of August. Over 300 ladies attended the conference and twenty-four Preacher's wives were there as well. We are grateful to Mrs. Parada, wife of Pastor Luis Parada in Long Beach, California, for coming and speaking to the ladies. She was a great blessing and an encouragement to all. Over 20 ladies were saved in three nights. In the months of August and September we had two weddings in our church. Both weddings involved young people who have been in our church since they were children. One was the bride of a young man who is a missionary in Africa. His name is Ruben Castillo from Mexico. He came to Panama to raise support and met Keysi, a girl that has attended our church since she was 8 years old. Keysi graduated from our Bible College four years ago, and she and Ruben were married on September 15. They are in Mexico right now and will be going to Ghana, Africa next year. Please pray for them. There is also a young lady from our church and graduate of our Bible College who is married to a young man in Texas, and he has since graduated from Bible College, and will be full-time in the ministry very soon. Little by little God is allowing us to train people to go out and serve Him in many different places. We praise the Lord for the spiritual and numeric growth that God has been giving us here in David, Panama. The attendance in the evening services the past few months has increased to over 200 people on many occasions. Our people have to come on their own for the evening services and most of them do not have cars. Due to the high cost of fuel we cannot use the buses all the time, but our people are still coming on their own. We have five different soul-winning programs in our church and we have at least 100 people saved every week through our visitation program. We usually never have less than 10 people saved on any given Sunday and at least one baptism. This past Sunday eleven were baptized. God is blessing us with more and more workers and Sunday School teachers as well! On October 26 we have our Patriotic Sunday with six high school bands invited to be in church for a parade. Last year over 100 teenagers were saved. Pray we have many more saved this year. On November 15, we will be having our College Graduation. At least four students will be graduating this year. Please pray for these future preachers and preacher's wives. Thanks for giving so we can go! In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
Thank you so much for your faithful support and for your prayers. We have been very busy the past three months. We trust you are enjoying your summer vacations and time with your families. It is always good to get away once in a while. May God bless each one of you. In the past three months we have been busy with Four Conferences, the visit of over 80 people from the States from different churches, I made a trip to preach in El Salvador, teaching in the Bible College, having a cat-scan, keeping four feeding centers going feeding 200 children, and doing the paperwork to see our Girls' Home grow. When I was sixteen years old I won a young man to the Lord who today is a missionary in El Salvador. I went to see him in May and I was really impressed with the work he is doing. He is in a town of over 80,000 people about 10 minutes from the Guatemalan border. He has a great testimony in this town and he is building a church building. He could use all the help he can get. If you would like to help this new work in El Salvador with their building, just send me the money and I will get it to him. Make sure it says on the check that it is for Bro. Gabriel Bonilla's church building in El Salvador. Thank you so much. We had a wonderful OLD PATHS BIBLE CONFERENCE the last
week of May. Bro. Allan Domelle came to preach along with Pastor May who
came with his wonderful wife. They were a great blessing and our people
enjoyed the preaching. My voice held up to be able to translate all the
preaching. In July we had three groups come down to visit our church, our feeding centers, and girl's home. Thanks to MANNA WORLDWIDE many people are giving so that we can feed 200 children, two meals a day, and also have a Girl's Home. These groups are always a blessing to have. One of the Pastors that came with his church preached our MISSIONS AND STEWARDSHIP CONFERENCE. Our people have committed to giving over $1,000.00 a month to missions. We also have a YOUTH CONFERENCE on July 30-Aug. 1. Pray many of our teens will surrender their lives to serve God. In July I also went to have a Cat-scan to see how I am
doing. The technician that ran the scan was saved as a young boy in our
church 15 years ago!!! He said that all looked well! Please pray for me
that I may get over the allergic reactions I have to certain foods due
to the side effects of the chemotherapy. Thank you once again for your
faithful prayers and support. May God bless you. Byron and Briceida Willis |
||||||||||
For the FIRST TIME since we started our
church in 1993, we celebrated a COUPLES RETREAT. We now have over 35 couples
in our church that are interested in having a good marriage and home.
It was an exciting time for all of the couples involved, and as a result
I am sure we will be Every week in our church we are seeing from 15 to 20 adults and young people being saved in our services and an average of five baptisms. We have four adult Sunday School classes, eight teen classes and 22 children's classes every Sunday morning. We also have two preaching services to be able to accommodate everyone in our auditorium. We will eventually need a larger building if we are going to keep growing and start running over 1,000 in church. A new building on a larger piece of property will cost us no less than $500,000.00. Please pray God would provide us the money we need to keep on growing and reaching more and more people for the Lord. My health is much better, but I do need some full-time
help. I pastor a church of over 700 people every Sunday morning and yet
I have no full-time staff men. I need help, but all of the $3,000.00 that
comes in monthly is spent on our buses, and regular church expenses. It
would cost me $500.00 a month to hire one man full-time. I have three
men that would quit their jobs on the spot if I had the money to hire
them. Would you support our church with this project? Hundreds would be
saved as a result! Thank you In His Service, Byron and Briceida Willis |
