Merry Christmas from our family to yours! We are enjoying our time in the states visiting family, friends and supporters for the holidays! We had a great time in Virginia and are looking forward to our time in Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania! It is always great to meet with different churches and help them plan their mission trips to the Dominican to serve alongside us!

We are excited because in January we are going to start our first session of the small group study Rooted with our entire church! For the last few months we have been preparing for the launch of this devotional series, please be praying for everybody involved.

Thank you for all of your prayers for our Cristo Urbano camp this summer! It was awesome! This year we hosted it at a new camp and we were a little worried about the attendance since it is further away but it was actually our highest attendance with 350 teens! A lot of new people came and 20 people came forward wanting to learn more about the plan of salvation and we got to celebrate four baptisms! Six more kids got baptized in the two weeks after camp! Every year is a challenge to raise the $5,000 for camp expenses, we appreciate everyone who helped out with those additional funds. We absolutely loved having the youth group from South Side Christian Church help at the camp and are excited to have them back again in July for next year’s youth retreat!

Our Cristo Urbano basketball team has also been a blessing for our church. This team started last year and the main purpose of it is to reach out to kids who aren’t Christians. Out of the eight non-Christians on the team, six of them have gotten baptized this year! Other players from our neighborhood who have never been in church have shown interest in joining our team because they have seen that not only are we talented but we also want to live life differently. We were a part of a summer tournament with 11 other churches and we won the championship!

We also got to have a family day at our church with games, food, fun and fellowship! Our church was encouraged to invite one person who doesn’t usually come and they did a great job welcoming everyone and making them feel at home! Our mission was accomplished because they felt encouraged and want to come back again! Two more couples from our youth group got to go through the love and respect video series with us and they are excited to start it with their friends!

Thanks a bunch for all of your prayers and support! We have a lot of projects coming up in 2018 and are looking forward to seeing what God has in store! This has been the year that Central Church has grown the most and we pray that next year through the Rooted study we continue to make more and more disciples!

All our love and prayers,

Isaias, Lenae and Troy Gabriel