Spring Update

Happy Spring! The weather is finally warming up, the sun is shining most days, and the grass we planted in our back garden is finally growing! It's a beautiful time to enjoy and be reminded of God's creation.

As usual, the English lessons continue. Alan currently has 11 active students, several of whom come more than once a week.  Many of these students have been coming for a while, but almost none of them showed any interest in truly studying the Bible until just recently. A few are starting to show some interest! We continue to pray for our students that their hearts will be open to studying more in depth.

The teens of the church just participated in their first ever Bible bowl. As far as I know, it was the first one that's been done here in Italy. It went really well. They have been studying the book of Luke with Alan, and they all did well.  We also had a great turnout of church members coming to support our teens on a Saturday night! And now the adults want to do an impromptu Bible bowl/Bible quiz type thing after our monthly pot lucks.

Last minute studying



Either they're all right or...


Waiting for the results



Checking the answers and adding up points

Video of some of the questions
And the results are in! 

We talked to the teens to ask them if they'd be interested in doing this again next year, and they said they want to do it again. So, I guess we'll be starting to pick a book/books soon and working on that later on this year.

I've started work on VBS this year. I'm currently in the process of translating all the lessons, games, arts and crafts, etc.  This year, I'm passing a lot of the work onto the ladies of the church.  I'm very excited to have so many people interested in helping out our kids!

Baby Kirby number two is on the way and is set to arrive August 2nd. So for now I still teach 4-5 English classes a week, but I may be giving them to Alan once we have two kids running around.

Also, I was asked at the beginning of the year to possibly write or organize a curriculum for our preschoolers. We have about 10 of them and right now we don't have a set lesson plan. So that's something else I may be working on this summer once lessons have slowed down.

The ladies Bible study recently finished their study on the book of James.  It seemed to go very well, and we all were reminded of things we need to do to improve our walk with God.

The church members still get together every Friday evening for a game of volleyball, and we are constantly getting together and having fellowships.

We have had three baptisms this year! A young couple who has been visiting for the past several months, decided to commit their lives to Christ, and one other lady who has been visiting for a while and studying with Stephano.

We also currently have several people visiting each week and Stephano is studying with several contacts. We always ask for and appreciate your prayers for his contacts as well as for our contacts.

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