Hi all! Well it's only been 7 months since my last blog, so thought it was about time to update, oops.
So the past few months have been really good. We've had a guy called Marco Diep (cousin of Veronica, for those that know her) from Mexico with us for the past 9 months. He's been an incredible help to all of us as a church plant here, serving in many many ways, too many to list to be honest. Sadly, he's going the end of this month back to Mexico so we'll miss him a lot. But before he goes, he wanted to travel and see a bit of England too so during August, I brought him with me for a visit which was great fun and a good opportunity for me to keep practicing my Spanish! After the week in England, I went to the US for 3 weeks, staying with Lis, my sister, and her family for about a week in San Diego before going up to Oregon for 2 weeks and having a whole family holiday together, including my parents and other sister, Lou, and her husband. It was so great being altogether again and the time went very quickly...
Anyways, since coming back to Madrid, things have been picking up very slowly. Work was pretty much impossible for almost the whole month of September, it's always a slow start teaching English. So things got pretty tight come the end of last month, but God has been faithful as always and has provided me with a lot more work again. Apart from that life is just pretty much the same, playing football at the weekends (another English guy joined my team this season so I can actually make sense of football chat/banter now!), working, socialising (reinforcing friendships made here and making new ones too) and church.
Church is very exciting at the moment! We meet as 2 small groups on Sundays, morning and evening, English and Spanish, 3 times a month with the possibility of a third group forming soon nearer the centre of the city. The other Sunday in the month we meet altogether which is great as we don't always get to see everyone that often in a given month. The other weekend we had a fantastic weekend away as a group with Guy and Heather Miller who gave us a lot of challenges, insight, teaching and encouragement and it's also great to hear of the support we have from back in England :-)

 

Recently, we've gotten in contact with an Apologist called Andy Wickham (English name, Spanish guy) who wants to do some stuff with us as a church plant. So this Thursday, we're having a debate night about the relevance of God in an age of science. It's a great opportunity for people here so we're hoping we get a good response of people coming along to it. Please help us by praying for it too :-) on the back of it, we're starting an Alpha course so things are really kicking off here! There's a video link too which I'll attach showing you a bit of the team and the needs that we have: http://vimeo.com/76123406
Well, that will do before this gets too long. Thank you to everyone who continues to support me out here whether it's by prayer or just by friendship. It's really good fun living in Madrid but it's a HUGE challenge too, so I really value all your support and encouragement, even if I may not always be vocal about it. And for those that do pray for me and the rest of the team, they're working and we're seeing a lot of answers! :-) Anyways, hope to hear from you all soon!