Dear praying friends,

I want to update you a little on our situation here and ask for prayer. First of all, please pray much for our people. Almost our entire church is either unemployed or underemployed. The economic situation in Mexico is horrible, and appears to be getting worse every day. A few have modest paying jobs, but most work at a subminimal wage. Most of our people barely make enough to buy food each day. Marcelo is now working at Walmart parking cars in the parking lot (it is sublet to an outside company). Marcelo has to pay his boss $3 dollars US per day for the privilege to work there. They pay him nothing, and he lives from the tips people give him. He works Monday-Friday 3PM-11PM, and makes around $60 total in those 5 days. His work week is 7 days though, and on Saturday and Sunday he goes in from 9AM until 11PM and makes about $50 dollars each of those days. Pay day weekends is less and that is the best on payday weekends. The gas attendants at the gas stations likewise have a tips only job, and they have to pay a kickback to the gas station owner to keep their jobs.

Pray that God would provide good jobs for our people, and jobs where they have Sundays off. This summer several have had to take jobs where they work on Sundays. Tule and I continue to help financially almost every family in our church, some one month and others another. Those who get ahead a little also help some of the others that have great financial needs, but all are limited (including us). Some of our members still give directly to us every to help our expenses.

This summer has been very difficult on our church. Almost every anchor family of our church has undergone assault by Satan. If it isn't sickness or financial problems, then it is bickering and infighting among our people. It has been extremely discouraging for me all of this. I pray daily for our people, but it is never enough. The only good thing (other than tribulation worketh patience that is) is that it seems the people are not mad at me, but mad at each other. I talk and talk, and visit, and try to rebuke those who walk in error or fight, and encourage those who have problems and are discouraged. We go forward one step, and back two it seems.

I would like to mention a few specifics. Yolanda Miranda is a lady who has a small shop upstairs from our church (we meet in a shopping center). She was taken to the hospital with high blood sugar and a tumor in her head. They operated and she is at home, but is parallized from the waist down. Mercedes is recovering nicely from her tumor also. A year and half ago, the doctors gave her 6 months to live, but she is still plugging along. They opened her skull and burned the tumor with laser but could not take it out for fear of the damage it would cause. Lucia (another elderly lady) had a blood sugar crisis, and her daughter Elizabeth called us and we went to help and took her to a hospital. She is out after spending a week in intensive care.

Marcelo and Maria Eugenia have stopped coming. Marcelo is working parking cars in Walmart, and works 7 days a week. Maria Eugenia isn't coming much. They are having marital problems. Raul and Eufemia also are having problems. They bought a car from Marcelo, and there are hard feelings in the deal, and that is a mess. I spent about 2 hours 2 Saturdays in a row talking to Raul, and I think he might start coming to church again. They have a real problem about forgiving people (including each other).

We had a young man from one of the shops above our church start coming. His name is Adolfo. Pray for him. He took drugs, and now sees demons and has demons after him. Supposedly he has stopped taking drugs completely, but the demons still cause him problems. He seems to have a fairly good understanding of salvation, and accepted the Lord with some other Christians, but is coming with us now. Laura and Josue also stopped coming for several months. He is Pentecostal and simply does not agree with me on the tongues and spiritual gifts issues. He doesn't want to talk with me about it either. They come because Laura insists they go to church somewhere. They have daily services in their home where Joshua leads the services with his family. His brother lives next door, is a Satanist, and has satanic ceremonies all the time. He said they have a coven of warlocks that meet regularly there, and sacrifice animals (throwing the dead bodies over the fence), and hate Josue and Laura. They try to do spells and stuff against Laura and Josue, and so their only defense is to pray, sing hymns, and have daily Bible studies. Please pray for them. One day this past week he said he only made $1 US dollars. A good day's pay for him is $10-$20 US dollars in a day. They are living in poverty.

We continue go door to door every Saturday, and every month or so we have visitors from that effort. Slowly we are getting more of our own people involved in this door to door work, and so far we have about 6 or so that go out more or less regularly with us. Satan always seems to bring up something to keep them from coming though, and once one starts coming, something stops that it seems.

I have a website http://www.davidcox.com.mx that has both English and Spanish Bible studies, books, sermons, etc. Our website statistics continue to grow. People are downloading about 15 gigabytes per month from my site. That is somewhere around 1 commercial CD of information (600MB) per day. For August 2007 we had 11,320 unique visitors, somewhere around 400 per day. Our visitors came from English and Spanish speaking countries around the world. Some unusual places where we had visitors are South Korea, South Africa, Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Singapore, France, Uganda, India, Romania, Netherlands, Indonesia, Taiwan, Cyprus, China, Egypt, etc.

We have books and things for the free Bible Software Program e-Sword. In August we had 2337 visitors to the page of my personal writings (books in Spanish for free download), 2399 visitors to the e-Sword Spanish index page, 1000 on the e-Sword Spanish Bible page, 838 on the Spanish Library page, 742 on the hymnal page, 728 on the English Library page, 664 on the Spanish tract page, 575 on the sermons page (most popular sermon was on the marriage, which is the most popular sermon almost every month, followed by Discipling our Children and Our Attitude toward Work), 538 on the Sunday School material page. On my tract page about Pentecostal Benny Hinn we had 340 visitors alone (which is the most popular almost every month with 170-200 downloads/month). My homileticas page in Spanish had 241 visitors in August. All of this is just for August 2007!

Just so you can see what people are doing, for August, we had 449 people who were on the website for more than 1 hour, 843 who were on it for 30 minutes to an hour, and 857 who visited from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. So people spent from some where between 1084 hours to 2000 hours in August on my website reading, studying, and downloading. I have no recreation stuff really on my site, so all of that was basically Bible study material. So far over the last year we have had 5 people or families come to our church because of seeing our website. Not all stay because some come over 1.5 to 2 hours to get to our church, but one family (Raul and Eufemia) are regular members because of it. Another family (Jorge and Martha) came for several months, but they found another church closer to their home. Last month another man came because of seeing the website.

I think most of the heavy downloading from our website is on the English side, but the Spanish side is where a lot of people are writing to me for help. I recommend a free Bible Study software called e-Sword (www.e-sword.net), and I have help pages in both English and Spanish in how to use it, as well as where to find Bible study books, commentaries, and Dictionaries. I personally make a lot of e-Sword modules from my own files, and copyright free books around the Internet. I am getting between 1 to 3 people per week asking for my help with some aspect of that program. I also get between 1-4 emails per month asking pastoral advice on general counseling issues.

On that note, I am getting about 1 email per month from pastors and laymen in Brazil. The remarkable thing about that is I don't speak Portuguese, nor is there anything on my website that is in Portuguese! I don't  exactly know what they are saying,  but I can more or less make  it out. Apparently spoken spanish and  portuguese is similar enough that you can understand about 95% of one from the other (more the Portuguese understanding the Spanish). The pastors are writing saying how much they like my sermons! (They don't comment much on books, studies, and sermons, much, but they really like our mp3 pulpit sermons!)

I recently got an email from a SJ (Seerangen Jawaharlal) Michaels, a pastor in Kaniyambadi India (near Chennai). He has a church of 100 people there, they have 5 preacher boys, and 10 churches/missions, and he stumbled on my website, and wrote praising me for what he found. He has no formal Bible training, and he says he found a feast of material on my site. He is downloading and preaching my material in his church. He has asked me to correspond with him so he can ask me questions about the ministry on a regular basis as a friend. I felt very good over this.

I also recently got an email from Graeme Coste in Perth, Western Australia asking me about information about the cult around R.B. Thieme which I reworked and reposted on my website. We are getting about 1 request per month or so for our hymns (96 classic old hymns) for worship services. They are mp3's that people can download freely from our website and play for singing with congregational singing. Even though I put them up for people to download (free), and they are heavily downloaded, some people don't know how to make a CD out of them, and write asking for an actual CD's instead. So far we are just giving them away in such cases, because we can afford it (thanks to your financial support), and it is too complicated to get money from all parts of the world to here. We also have people writing asking for me to sell them copies of my books I have written in Spanish. Likewise I am sending them out for free (just asking for a love offering of what they can give) as long as I can afford to do so. We pay for the photocopying and shipping.

We even had a Christian radio station in Dominican Republic write asking if I would give them permission to use our mp3 hymns on a weekly basis on their radio station. We gave them permission to use them freely. So far I have had about 3 Christian radio stations from Spanish speaking countries write me asking about music or my mp3 sermons, and I have given them all permission to use them freely as they see fit.

This past week I also got an email from a Julio R. Pereyra from Uruguay, a young pastor in a Baptist church there. He says that he has really gotten a lot from my website. Another brother from the mountains in Argentina is teaching in a seminary there, and he wrote to say that he is using my Spanish studies and sermons for classes in their seminary, and thanked me for all the material I am putting up.

I really am just posting things that I am making, preaching, and teaching in my own church, but it seems like God is giving us a broader outreach than I had imagined possible. We would ask that you would please pray for us. Homeschooling consumes much of my week, and between that and my sermons, I continue to get up early and go to bed late. It gets tiring sometimes, and as I get older, things get harder and harder on me. But I see spiritual benefit for the Lord's work, and I keep wanting to do more and more.

I would ask that you would also pray that God would give us some serious people in our church that would help me in the ministry, and also that God would send us a young preacher (without a lot of personal problems). We have had help in the past, but they come with so many problems that they are practically useless to me.

Finally please also pray for our financial situation. Our support base continues to erode with time, and our expenses continue to grow. It is my earnest desire to not go back to the US to raise more funds. I want to stay on the field and work here, not be a coast to coast fund raiser in the US. I feel like we have a spiritual impact here, and we would lose that if we go back to the US, and our church does not have a national to take responsibility if I left at this point. This is inspite of me trying to work with several God has sent our way, but they just have not worked out at all.

In Christ,
David and Tule Cox