Dear Praying
friends,
February 2, 2006
We are doing
well. I continue to work producing tracts in Spanish. Right now I have some
weeks that I make 2-3 tracts. I use them in our door to door work, and some
I use in our church as handouts for sermons. I am slowly translating them
over into English. The English tracts can be found
at
http://www.davidcox.com.mx/tracts/index.htm. I have about 5 right now
and am translating more. Titles at the moment are:
Biblical Principles for a Solid Marriage,
Will a Man Rob God?, Marks of a False Prophet,
Paying the Pastor, and How to Pray for Missionaries. They
can be read online or downloaded in Microsoft Word format and printed on
your printer without charge except what it costs you to print them.
Our work
continues to do well. We were running about 20 some last year in the
services, and about 40 in the meals we have every couple of months. This
year we are running about 25-30 each week, and about 50 in the meals, and we
have stopped inviting people to the meals because of space considerations.
That 50 is usually without guests. I have been pleased to have 25 in Sunday
night and Thursday night prayer meetings. About half of our people are very
faithful. As the rest sit in services and grow spiritually, they begin to
start coming more and get involved. The big problem is to get them to come
and sit for a half dozen or dozen services.
Pray
for our building situation. We are renting a place from a
Christian man that goes to another church. He let us use it rent free last
year, but I pushed our people to be more responsible and in December we
voted to pay him $100 a month even though he is not asking it. I am trying
to make our people financially responsable, and this is part of it. We do
not want to invest much in his property so we are trying to fix up more room
for Sunday School rooms on cheap. Cheap materials and doing it ourselves. We
have a building fund and program and slowly we are seeing that grow. It is
over a $1500 dollars right now (we would need probably $50,000 dollars to
buy a vacant lot, and another $50,000 to build). So we are still a long way
from purchasing something. There is an excellent vacant lot in front of our
church that is about 100 feet by 300 feet that is going to $500,000 dollars.
Anything larger that what we have (40 feet by 120 feet) is considered prime
commercial land and is outrageously high. Way beyond our means at the
present. Pray that God will provide us our own property somewhere well
located. Our present property is excellently located which has brought us
several members just because they passed by and saw the sign. We are also
praying that the Christian man who owns this property will be moved to sell
it to us at a reasonable price with a payment plan.
Pray
for our various ministries on the internet. I also continue to
record almost all of my sermons and put them on my website (only Spanish
sorry!). I have had 527 visits to this page since about September when I
started posting sermons. Considering I do not pay services to register my
site, the only visits I usually get are from people I have contact with in
some way. So that is a lot of visits really.Our Spanish library site has
1100 visits, and I am still just getting things posted on there that are not
really all that much. It is a ministry to provide study material to people
in Spanish. Most Spanish speaking pastors don't have resources or finances
to buy commentaries and books, so they look for free things on the internet.
I try to either post it on my website or link to others so that they can
have easy access to it.
We still
struggle with some of our people greatly. It is becoming very apparent to me
that our biggest problem in almost every family is a daily
provision. One of our men is a welder and does body work on
cars, and gets usually $30-$40 a week. That hardly pays for groceries for
one person. (He is single and owns his own home.) Those who have work don't
get paid enough to make ends meet. Many have no jobs, and when they get one,
the business is on a change their employees every year plan. They do that
because when an employee works for them for most of the year and is still
working through December, the government by law makes them pay them an
extra month's income for Christmas, plus give them a week off at Christmas.
Around April is when businesses have to "share profits" with their active
employees, and as such these two times mean that a bunch get fired just
before then so that the companies cut their costs. Unfortunately they don't
rehire them but look for new people. In a city with this much people, and so
many unemployed, it is fairly easy to find new people. I don't think many of
the schools properly prepare the worker very well either. I one time got in
a cab and was talking to the driver and he told me he was studying to be
brain surgeon. I laughed inside, but later found out that professional
people often end up like this because their preparation was inadequate or
the job market just would not provide them with a job in their studied
field. Many people go the self-employed route, making less money usually but
at least they don't get laid off as easy. They have no capital to start
these small businesses so they improvise. In every neighborhood, on every
street you can count two or three to half a dozen garages open that are
selling food or like a small store selling usually kids snacks and candy.
That is how they start, and for some it goes well enough to put in a regular
(more or less) store front and real shelves.
Our church
continues to grow through contacts of our people. We continue to go out
every Thursday and Saturday door to door witnessing.
We give out about 400-500 tracts each time. Last Saturday Tule had a women's
breakfast and just the men went out and we had 7 men. We have had around 13
or more going out some Saturdays. We see people pray and accept Christ as
Saviour, but as a pastor, I don't put much stock in these decisions until I
see them get baptized and coming to the church regularly and participating.
Pray for our followup and discipleship of these people.
That is very difficult for some reason, and people will agree to anything on
the street, but to come to church is a different thing altogether. Even our
"regular" folk have problems with consistency. I continue to hit on these
topics and slowly we are seeing some of our regular folk coming regular like
they should be. The city really pulls against this tremendously. You don't
understand what these people go through until you have to buy something and
it is only downtown (or half price downtown), so you "run down there to pick
it up". That little trek in a car is about 5-6 hours round trip. In public
transportation like most people go (even if they have a car) it runs 6-8
hours. If you get caught in a march or something, or a police grabs you for
parking in the wrong area, going the wrong way down a street, or just to get
a bribe from you, you can expect to get home at 9-10PM at best, hopefully
with the vehicle.
One of our
single guys is an engineer, and he cannot find work in his profession. He is
working in the meantime as a phone surveyor, calling people to take a phone
poll. He is supposed to get around $120 dollars every 2 weeks. An engineer
will get around $200-300 dollars in two weeks. He mentioned that last pay
period he got $10 dollars. If he arrives late to work (1pm) by even 10
minutes then they turn him back and scratch the day. They pay by the day. He
had 6 work days scratched, and then they charged him some kind of fees and
taxes for the first quarter and he almost had to pay them instead of them
paying him. He usually takes 2 hours to get to work, and two hours to get
home on public transportation.
Pray
for our health. On another note, I would like to refer you to a
CNN article about air pollution in Mexico City, just so you can know what
labor under on a daily basis.
"Mexico
City is among the world's most polluted cities. The metropolis of 18 million
failed to meet acceptable air quality standards for ozone limits 284 days
last year, Luege said, though earlier environmental measures have led to
major improvements in other pollutants, such as lead.
Cars and trucks, especially those that run
on diesel fuel, are the biggest polluters. An estimated 6 million cars clog
the capital's streets each day, and that number is expected to double in 15
years, Luege said. According to
a study by Mexico's 1995 Nobel chemistry prize winner, Mario Molina, who is
coordinating a 10-year project to improve air quality in Mexico City, the
city's residents lose 2.5 million working days every year because of health
problems caused by particle matter, such as soot."
The article
missed the population of Mexico City as many do who do not understand our
city. Mexico City technically is like Washington DC, it is a federal
district under a special plan under Congress. Our D.F. (District Federal) is
one city, and the State of Mexico is a small state that is about the same
area as DF but surrounds DF in a doughnut like shape. Here we consider
Mexico City or DF both. There is no line or way of telling one from the
other, and all is dense city from DF through the state of Mexico. DF has
about 18-20 million people and the state of Mexico the same, another 18-20
million making the entire metropolitan center around 38-40 million people. I
have seen recent statistics that put the population as low as 34 million,
but they are slowly bumping that minimum number up. The census numbers
usually are rounded down by the official census bureau, but they have
problems getting people at home, or to answer the census honestly.
The pollution
is a constant problem for us, and we usually see it in a flu like sickness
that really never breaks out with a runny nose, couching, nor sneezing, just
like you are about to get all that, achy body, and it goes like that for
months. Leave the city, and within an hour you are back to normal. Come back
into the city, and within an hour of coming back under the umbrella of smog,
you get the feeling again.
Please pray for
us. We continue to work faithfully in our ministry here, and we have weekly
even daily challenges in the ministry. I am getting more counseling
opportunities as the church grows, and we continue to deal with wierd off
beat religions and groups in the door to door work. Usually new stuff always
provokes either a sermon, book, or tract from me to deal with it. That is a
lot of work on me each week. I still teach both our kids all their school
work in the mornings each week day. Some days are difficult because I have
to go downtown or do something. Pray for us as we handle a full schedule
every day.
In Christ,
David Cox
since feb 2006