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Grace Baptist Bible Institute
In October we finished our class on “The Life and Death of Jesus Christ”. We also began the next class “The Glorious Gospel Part 1” where we will go even deeper into the precious doctrines of how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit save us from sin’s power, pleasure, penalty, and presence. We are also starting a 5 week class on “The book of Acts”. I am thankful my pastor, Brother Bill Lee, from our sending Church, is able to come visit and will be helping me teach this class! Please pray that our Lord would be exalted and glorified in our teaching!
Grace Bannasan - Publishing Ministry
It has been a busy few months here at Grace Bannasan! We just finalized our first Lahu book and will be distributing most of those through Bro. Paul Brown in MaeAi. I believe this book will be a great blessing to the pastors and churches he works with! We also printed a new tract on the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a book on Baptist Church Membership, and another on Christian Responsibility. So thankful for the opportunity to get these books in circulation here in Thailand. We will be giving many of these away to other missionaries, seminaries, and churches. They are extremely grateful and we are excited to see them being used!
Please be in prayer about a couple of specific needs I have regarding printed material to use for the Bible School. As you can see at the bottom of the letter, our translation and printing budget has dwindled to almost nothing due to several new books that we translated, printed and distributed over the past two months. We have three more books that are almost finished and I would very much like to get them printed and ready to use here in the Bible School. One of them is the Fundamentals of the Faith book that I use as my introductory class at the Bible school as well as a guidebook for new members at the church here we are planning to start soon. There is a great need for this workbook as it provides a simple and clear walkthrough of basic bible study and understanding. We still need around $2,000 to get this book finished up and printed.
The other book of great importance right now is a workbook on studying the Scriptures. I plan to use this book in one of our classes here at GBBI in January or February of next year. We still need around $3,200 to get this book completed.
We currently have several projects going at Grace Bannasan and we are truly grateful for the on-going support received to provide for this need here in Thailand. It is a blessing for the people here to receive theologically sound literature and workbooks that they can use in their own churches and ministries.
Church
The group of baptized believers here have been meeting regularly on Sundays and during the week. We have discussed our desire to formally covenant together to start a baptist church here in our area. Please pray for the Lord to give us wisdom as we meet to go over what a church is and what a church believes. Pray that we would be a gospel witness among one another and the community both in our preaching and living.
Family
Thank you for your continued prayers! My wife and kids are doing great and the school year seems to be off to a great start. We are all now looking forward to visits from Bro Bill Lee and Rick Cash in November as well as Brittany’s parents in December/January! The kids are very much looking forward to upcoming school breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas so they can sleep in and get some rest. Prayers are appreciated particularly for our oldest two, Cohen and Lyla. They are both enrolled this year in a private school online but that means their classes are all in the evenings. They have class online every night from 7:00-11:00pm. Then they wake up the next day to do homework and study for their upcoming class that evening. They are doing surprisingly well considering but do pray for them as it is definitely a more taxing schedule than “normal”. It has been good for them in many ways because they have been able to make some friends and feel a bit more connected. We are so busy here with the Bible School that we really don’t get out much so they were missing that aspect and we are thankful for the opportunities they now have to fill that gap.
For HIS Glory,
Matthew Villandry