Going to the church planting conference earlier this year, helped me become a better leader for our church because now the mentality is not “let’s grow our church but instead it is let’s grow His kingdom”. One of the main steps that we took to grow the kingdom of God in our community, was to enable the church to start small groups. We began the year with 10 small groups and now looking towards the end of the year, we have around 25 small groups throughout our city. God has been good and faithful. We have seen how our church has new faces visiting every Sunday. Our challenge is to allow those visitors to plug into these different groups so they can continue their growth in Christ through community. There is a big chance that by early 2017 we are going to have more than 30 healthy small groups all over the city of Santiago.

With some of the new programs that they have started in the church this year, we have overcome some traditions of a 30+ year church. It wasn’t easy because once the church has established some traditions like: when to meet, where to meet, what days to meet, setup of the services, who can lead and who can’t lead, it is difficult to break that mold.  But thanks to the leadership of the church, we have been able to come together to make some changes and move forward with the new direction of the church.

One of the things that I have been really excited about is to be able to have a few couples’ groups in our church. We stared a few “Love and Respect” groups, one at my sister Samira and Tim’s house and another one in our house.  The great outcome of that is that the couples loved it so much that many of them are starting their own “Love and respect” small groups at their house with their friends. I never saw this coming but God has a great sense of humor. Sometimes we think that our plans are good but God’s plans are always going to be better than ours.

Our church continues to grow and we continue to delegate leadership roles within our congregation. For this 2017 we plan to start a COLLEGE MINISTRY, and also we are going to break in groups the youth group; we are going to have a few people leading each group (high school, middle school and college.) And it makes me really happy that many of these leaders are going to be kids that grew up in my youth group, so I know “they get it” they know what we are trying to do. They know that our model of ministry always has been TO MAKE DISCIPLES THAT MAKE DISCIPLES. SO PLEASE keep these things in your prayers because now as a teaching pastor I love what I get to do and I always try to be the guy that pushes people to reach their potential in ministry. So I’m rooting for my crew, they know I have their backs.  

 On another note, I was very blessed to be able to go and perform a concert at JOHNSON UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA. Thanks for that opportunity, even though Angelito and Albania couldn’t get their visas for that event we were really happy to know that our music keeps growing outside our country. Recently I dropped a new video of a song I dedicated to my wife, Lenae, hope you guys like it. Also, just today, I confirmed the dates for CRISTO URBANO camp in 2017. Don’t forget to pray for this event that for so many years has been changing kids’ lives all over the country and don’t forget to give to make this possible. Also keep praying for our next album RIMAS 3R…it’s coming soon.