Missão Global 2015

MONDIM DE BASTO:

My name is Helcio Lange da Silva, I’m Brazilian and have worked in Portugal for over twenty years in a church planting ministry. Together with my wife Angela, who is British, and our four children, we moved to Mondim de Basto in 2001. As independent missionaries, we are not supported by a missionary agency or denomination, but have the full backing of our respective churches, and over the years we have networked closely with other churches and workers in the area. We moved to the town with Peter and Jane Richards who had set up English language schools. They stayed for three years, we were helped for a short time by a Portuguese couple and since 2005 have had the help and cooperation of Carol Green, a British missionary.

Mondim de Basto is a very small, traditional, rural community in Trás os Montes. Similar to the three surrounding districts, it had no Evangelical work there when we arrived. It’s an area of continued emigration, high unemployment and low academic and professional standards.

The first thing we did was to set up a language school, in which we have all taught. We were, and still are known as language teachers, having also had the responsibility of teaching English in all the primary schools in the district. We only opened a meeting place in 2004: for almost a year the family were the only congregation.  Although we have organized some evangelistic activities such as running an Alpha course, showing films and having evangelistic events with the help of Ywam, OM and other churches, we feel the people who have come to join us, becoming Christians and part of the church, (about 25) have come mostly as a result of prayer and personal contact. As a family we are involved in the local community, schools, Parents’ Association, CPCJ. and have developed some good relationships with people in the Catholic church, having even been invited there to preach in “Unity Week”!

CABECEIRAS DE BASTO:

After having established the beginnings of a church in Mondim and being by calling a church planter, my sights were set on Cabeceiras de Basto, a larger, neighbouring district which didn’t have an Evangelical church. Some of the members of our church in Mondim live in Arco de Baúlhe which belongs to the district of Cabeceiras de Basto and is only 6kms away, so it seemed a natural progression.

In March 2008 we hired a small hall, and launched the work in the context of a leaders’ conference we held in the town, to which we invited workers from other churches, and which included an evangelistic event.  Since then we have shown evangelistic films and had an evangelism day there. We’ve also held children’s meetings in the hall. However, although we have had some visitors and one elderly lady from an outlying village has had an experience with God, the work there hasn’t really got off the ground. We feel the main reason has been that we haven’t got a “worker” actually living in the town. At present we’re re-thinking our position and strategy in Cabeceiras.

LET’S KEEP PRAYING FOR THE LANGE FAMILY AND FOR MORE MISSIONARIES/WORKERS TO TERRAS DE BASTO