Hello everyone!

Thought it was about time to update the blog again! And it shouldn't be so bad as I've only taken 2 months before writing again this time!

Well after what seemed like an eternal summer, the past 2 months have flown by! The weather has definitely changed and gone are the shorts as well as apparently my tan! :-( was such a nice colour not that long ago too, ha!

Anways, thank you all for praying! Some more great answers to prayer have happened. In regards to work that has picked up dramatically and now I'm actually inundated with it all and the ridiculous thing is that I now have to be careful I don't overwork! Never seemed to be a problem before lol. But it's good, I'm meeting lots of new interesting people too! So October was pretty much just a "normal" month I guess. I've been working a lot, meeting up with people, etc. Our church group are now fully into the smaller groups. It's a bit complicated if you don't stay on top of it (but we're all great here!) but the 1st and 3rd Sunday of every month we meet in smaller groups, one in the morning the other in the evening. My group is more for the younger generation and unmarried (apart from Al and Sal). It's a real blessing to be a part of this little group and exciting to see us grow together spiritually as well as hopefully numerically. Then the 2nd Sunday of every month is a social where we want to meet up with a lot of the friends we're making here, instead of just a church group. In October, we all met up and went to a local fair which was just fun and a good opportunity of being together. This month, we held an evening where we invited all of our own personal intercambios (the people who we meet up with to practice Spanish and for them to practice English) for an intercambio evening altogether. Considering there are around 20 of us adults, even though we weren't all there, we reckon we must've had at least 20 guests come along! They had a brilliant time, it was a ridiculous success and it's now made us think that this is what we could try doing more regularly to serve the community and the people of Madrid. Finally, the 4th Sunday of every month we meet altogether in the local that we rent and they have been going well still, pretty much all in Spanish (Kevin Bartlett does an excellent job preaching every week in Spanish). This next month we are planning to do a traditional English Carol service so we're planning for that now, praying that we'll get a good turnout for that too!

I've also now joined a football team (finally!) that plays every Saturday. They are brilliant guys and very easy to get on with. I've also seemed to have fitted in very quickly with them which is a surprise to be honest considering they're a good team! And I've actually done alright, scoring more goals than I've played games which has been just as much a surprise to me as to them! I like to show Spaniards that there's nothing wrong with the English system of long ball, run and score :-)

Also, I have a really really good friend here who's been so so good to me! He went off to England for a week and gave me his Real Madrid season ticket for the game he was going to miss. But even since he's come back, I'm still to give it to him (not my choice not to!) but coz I still have it, I've been to all their home games since! And all for free, amazing! Not looking forward to giving it back lol. I'm hoping to stretch it out just a little little bit more as there are some good games coming up next! I've a feeling he may want it back before then, especially if he's reading this too :-)

Finally, just to let you know if you don't already I will be coming back for Christmas! First time in 9 months so am very excited about that. Looking forward to seeing many of you again. I know a lot of you will be away but hopefully I'll get to see some of you at some point.

Oh, sorry. For all those who are praying for us, we would love prayer for:

• us as a church group, that we will continue having such a success with the socials we do and more importantly that we meet key people who could really open the door for us in regards to getting the Spanish people in!
• pray that we continue getting stuck into the language and the culture here

That's probably about it for now! Thanks so much for reading all of this, if you've got this far! Hopefully see a lot of you very soon! If not, please let me know how you're doing whenever, it's always good to hear from people back home wherever that is :-)

Dave

Hey hey one and all! Well I've finally got round to updating my blog again! Firstly, thank you to everyone who continues to support us in prayer, their results are most certainly being felt here!

Well since the last time I blogged, a fair bit has been going on. June seemed to feel like a bit of a wind down month. As the summer is long and hot here, all schools finish the end of June and don't start again until the beginning or mid-September. So I had quite a lot of teaching work around then, people wanting to finish up but then everything literally dried up to nothing! That was a fun time...lol. It wasn't that bad in the end, God was really good! I got to work at a football camp teaching English for 2 hours a day for the month of July. That was really fun, if not badly organized! I got to meet some pretty cool people in the world of Spanish football and held the real life World Cup Spain won!

Although I was only working 2 hours a day, I had a class of around 40 kids just to myself so it was a long month! At the end, I had a "relaxing" weekend in Malaga with some friends. But it was nice to get out of the city for at least a couple of days :-)

In August, both the English families (Bartletts and Whiteheads) went back to England for the month so I was here pretty much by myself! Work slowed down to an agonizing 1 or 2 hours a week but I filled my time with watching the Olympics and using the Bartlett's pool every day! I had some friends come out to see me which was fun, just did the touristy things in the city (which is almost empty during August, very strange!) and kinda chilled out lol. As beautiful as Madrid is, I wouldn't advise anyone to come out here during August though. It was very very hot and difficult to do much (apart from swim!). If that's all you want to do by all means come here but for me it's just stupid :-) but come out here any other time!

This month has been getting back to normal a little bit. Both families came back at the beginning of the month as well as (finally) the other English family -- the Capes -- who we've been waiting for for ages! It was great that everything had come together and they were eventually able to move over. So this month has been a challenge for them, two children have come over with them too so we've been working together to get them sorted out and settled as quickly as possible, especially since we all remember what the first few months here were like! English teaching has very slowly started to get going again, hopefully by next week things will all be back to normal. It's been a real testing time financially, didn't realize quite how difficult it was going to be, but God has been ridiculously faithful like normal and has always provided for me!

As for us as a group, we are now around 17/18 people including kids plus one or two others who are showing interest so we're too big to meet as a group in the Bartlett's flat. At the beginning of this month, we found a local to meet in, a little bit more in the centre of the city. It's a great space and we've tried it out a couple times now, meeting Sunday evenings altogether which have been great. As we're still at the birthing stage of all of this and not yet really wanting to launch but yet needing to do something slightly more public, we've been trying to find the right balance of what to do. After this Sunday, we are going to try meeting up as 2 small groups every week, perhaps one in Spanish and the other in English for now as English is still very much something that draws people in, then once a month use the local to meet altogether. It's something that none of us really knows how it will go but we feel it's the right step forward and the best way of growing this church plant the way God wants it to. So we'd really value your prayers especially around this :-) since moving into the local, we started doing our meetings in Spanish translated into English and every single team member has really stepped up to the plate. Kevin has done an awesome job preaching in Spanish, Al has been excellent leading worship in Spanish and everyone else has done a fantastic job translating into English! It's my turn to translate the preach into English on Sunday which, now thinking about it, I'm nervous about since everyone has been so brilliant before! No pressure :-)

As mentioned before, God has really blessed me these past few months -- well, what feels like more than normal at least! I was given a free ticket to go watch Real Madrid play a few weeks ago, thinking it was going to be a cheap seat, but still happy! Turned out to be about 10 rows from the pitch (I could shout at Ronaldo to stop being a baby loud enough for him to hear) and right next to the VIP area, so I met a couple of famous Spanish people too!

Other crazy stuff has happened which, believe it or not, feels like I just stumble into! But I know God is just being amazingly gracious to me :-) Some of my English students too are in very interesting positions which I get to talk to them about and also makes me think that if they became Christians, their world of influence would be huge!

So all in all, things are going very well! There are some major challenges to face, especially still in everyday life, but that's to be expected and to be honest is great as it's character testing and really makes you live what you believe rather than just saying it.

Prayer points:

• Please pray for the Capes to settle in very well quickly, make friends and feel at home.
• Please pray for us as a group that this next stage is a real fruitful time in relationships, finding people interested and that we move on into the plans that God has in store for us here.
• For me personally, please pray that I pick up a little bit more work, still not enough yet but more importantly that God uses me in the lives of the people that I come into contact with.

Thanks loads everyone! Like I said, I really feel your support from here and your prayers are so very effective! Love you and miss you all :-)

Dave

Hey all! Well, considering I was meant to do a monthly blog update, I haven't been doing so well...I'm sorry! A crazy amount has happened since the last time I wrote so will try to remember all that's happened, no doubt I'll forget a huge amount but I'll try! And also, feel free to drop me a message anytime you like, always good to hear from you :-)

So, I'm still alive! :-) I've gained more work which is great, almost have a full on teaching week now finally! Although I would still like a bit more if I can find it, bit harder now that my schedule is pretty fixed. But Spain does love their holidays, 2 days off a couple of weeks ago and 2 days this week! Annoying thing about that is no work for me so no money which is frustrating at times. But apart from that work is going well. I'm still in the same flat, but one of my housemates left about a month ago as he finally found work back home in Murcia, so it's a bit quieter in the flat now there's only 3 of us. I've started playing football twice a week now, on Sundays with one of my housemates in a 7 a side league which is great, and Monday nights for a kickabout with some guys. That one is a pretty late one, we only start playing at half 10 but since last week the weather has changed dramatically and it's been HOT every day so it's very nice to play late :-) I've been making more friends which is good, so my spare time is filling up very quickly. It's great coz they want to practice their English and I get to talk a lot, which I love, and most importantly, I get to talk about the church plant and more about Christianity and they listen to me!! :-) some have even shown an interest in what we're doing here so we'll see what happens with them.

As a church plant, things have been going very well. We've had a few social events which have been well attended and a great success, God is really blessing us in that.We still meet on Saturday nights which is a great time for us to grow together. I now offically "lead" the kids work although there aren't many of them so isn't as big as it sounds lol. We've had Guy and Heather Miller out here which was a brilliant weekend. At the end of March was the Iberian Peninsula Conference where all the Newfrontier churches in Portugal and Spain met in a place called Penafiel near Porto. We had a lot of leaders over from England too. That was a great conference and we all left with a real sense of God's blessing and renewal on us to impact the cities where we are. There was also a free Christian concert in a park in Madrid the other weekend organized by Kaka's (a Brazilian footballer who plays for Madrid) wife which Hillsong London were at plus other groups/artists famous in Spanish circles. So we all went there as a group which was good, only shame was the day was rainy so there weren't as many people around -- Spanish people don't seem to like the rain as much as English people do ;-)
Umm, now am struggling to think of what else has been going on...sure I've missed a load. Oh well, this is probably long enough and like I said, you can always message me and I could probably tell you more, plus I would love to know how you're doing! :-) anyways, this blog is a bit boring so will try and find some interesting pictures to put with it!

Love you and miss you loads,
Dave

I nicked this picture, but this is of some of us at the Iberian Peninsula Conference

Obviously, I'm not very good at taking photos as I nicked that one and have no others of real interest to show you! Maybe next time :-) take care!