April, 2023
Dear Praying Friends,
In my previous prayer letter, I mentioned that we had been having new guests visit the church every week! That trend remained unbroken from December 6-April 16. It resumed, however, on April 23, with seven new visitors! It has just been so exciting to wonder who the Lord will bring through the door next.
On April 2, our church celebrated its 5th anniversary. We were blessed to have Dr. Hartman from Shalom Ministries as our guest speaker. He is the man whom God used more than any other to first bring me to the city in 2005. I came as an intern with his ministry as a sophomore in college. During that time, I slept on the floor of Bethel Baptist Fellowship in Brooklyn. God gave me a vision for city ministry at that time and when I graduated from Ambassador Baptist College, I was allowed to come back and train under Pastor Jim Bickel at the same church which I slept at that summer. As God would have it, our church plant is now located in the shadow of a building which a younger Mr. Hartman spent much time in with his grandparents. We have people coming to our church now from that same building!
Our anniversary service was special also because of the number of people which showed up. We had sent out over 700 mailers to 5 of the closest buildings to the church and were praying that God would bless us with at least 50 people in attendance that day. Our previous high had been 49 people! That particular Sunday we had 66 people in attendance! Many of those were from the immediate neighborhood.
Not only has our church been growing in attendance. Those who have been coming faithfully have been growing spiritually. One example of this can be seen in our midweek prayer and Bible study meetings. For a long time, these meetings were very poorly attended, and the praying seemed very shallow and weak. With the excitement about what God has been doing on Sundays, those who had been attending sporadically on Wednesdays became more faithful about meeting in the middle of the week. With more and new people to pray with, the prayer times have been lasting longer and there has been more sharing of one another’s burdens. Furthermore, as a result of seeing what God has been doing, the believers are beginning to ask God for bigger things such as the revival of their own hearts and the awakening of lost loved ones and those in our neighborhoods. It is thrilling to see the Spirit of God breathing new life into what often seemed like a dead exercise!
Also, it has been a blessing to hand over the responsibility of teaching our teens to the first man who was a fruit of our ministry in the Bronx. Ever since his salvation, Rogelio has had an appetite for God’s Word and now he is sharing what he has learned with our young people. Please pray that God uses him powerfully in our teen group!
Serving in “da Bronx”,
The Hamilton Family
Ben & Andrea, Elaine, Nolan, Liberty, Nehemiah, Henry, Peter, and Finn
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