January 2022
Dear Praying Friends,
It has been an interesting couple of months her in the Bronx. At the beginning of November, we were blessed with a new temporary meeting place for our church! This space is much nicer than our spot at the martial arts center and has allowed us the opportunity to restart our children’s program and to have a nursery space. Having a children’s ministry and nursery has been a strong desire of mine ever since we lost our space at Walton High School in March of 2020. At the beginning of 2021, I asked the church to pray that we would be able to rent a space for $2,500 by the end of the year. Though the asking price of this new place was a little higher, those which we are renting from lowered it to meet our budget. Praise the Lord for that answer to prayer!
The space is much nicer than where we have been, but I still view it as a temporary solution. It is not in our target neighborhood and we only have it for a few hours on Sunday morning and Thursday evening. The plan is to still get a place where we do not need to carry things in for every service and where we have complete access throughout the week. Right now we are just happy to be in a place with heat for the winter!
After making it through nearly two years without contracting COVID, the virus finally caught up with our family on the week before Christmas. We not been alone in catching it! Nearly everyone in our church has experienced COVID or some other lingering virus in the past three weeks. Our special Christmas Sunday was cancelled because my whole family was sick, and in the weeks following Christmas our attendance has been decimated. This last Sunday we only had four people who were well enough to attend.
Usually, when only four people attend a Sunday service, the pastor has a tendency to be disappointed and even discouraged. That was not the case this past Sunday. Not only did I know that those who didn’t come had legitimate reasons for not showing up, but one of the people who did come was a great encouragement. Her name is Ama. As a child she immigrated from Ghana and has been living in the Bronx ever since. We met her over two years ago, when she first began receiving free food from our church. Every other Friday, our church has the opportunity to give away groceries to those in need. I pick up the food late on Thursday evening and my family and I hand it out in front of my house at 8 AM on Friday morning. We have a group of about 10 regulars which begin lining up at 7:30 AM. Ama is often the first in line and for quite some time she has said that one day she would stop by. Thankfully, on a day when nearly nobody else came, God sent her to be an encouragement to us remind us that our labors are not in vain. I doubt that Ama knows the Lord, so please pray for her salvation!
During the pandemic our church has not seen many visitors, so it was a special blessing to have Ama in attendance. The fear machine which is constantly being ramped up in the news has been very effective in keeping people out of church. As this spring approaches, please be in prayer that Jesus would bring souls to Himself in the Bronx and that He would then add them to Emmaus Road Baptist Church.
The Hamilton Family Team
Ben & Andrea, Elaine, Nolan, Liberty, Nehemiah, Henry, Peter, and Finn |
