Churches Uniting as One
Lourens and Marie Laureti minister among the Mengen people in Papua New Guinea. “One of our goals is to get churches to work together and help each other, not just in spiritual and ministry needs, but also in technical or practical ways. This is a way to foster unity, function as a body and portray the body functioning and working together. A recent project was to assist the Bala church in constructing a building in which they can meet for services and teach literacy. We had many different churches donate funds toward this and also come and help build. The Ata church had major damage due to a tornado kind of wind that ripped off the roof and siding from the old missionary houses which they now use for literacy classes, storage, office space and larger group accommodation. Again, we had many different donations come in to help them and had a bunch of churches come together to help fix up these buildings quickly. Since January, we have been working on developing 10 modules on biblical leadership within the church. Kaiko, Kewaka and I have been working on these here at our support centre. When we eventually got the first draft completed, we had a test run among the Nakanai leaders from Central New Britain right here at our support centre. After we travelled in Central, we then travelled to the North Coast of New Britain where we taught the leadership modules again to the church leaders from the North Coast churches. It was awesome to see key leaders from five churches walking days long, travelling by boat and sleeping next to the road to come to the teaching. We taught about 10 sessions and had many different meetings with individual churches and their leadership. Pray for these endeavors and the progress of the leadership training. Watch a video of the trip.