General Assembly

This afternoon we held a fantastic general assembly of all our leaders online. It lasted for two hours and 40 minutes and at the end nobody wanted to leave. The only pastor who didn't take part was absent because his vehicle broke down with a load of sweet potatoes on board! The pastor in Portugal took part and the pastor in England. The first matter on the agenda was the role call.

We then formally recognized the two church plants at Barra de Oitis and Vazante as fully fledged churches led by Pastor Nezinho Abílio. We then officially recognized Fábio Furtado as an EAB/ACEV worker responsible for the church plants at Travessia and Fonseca. How wonderful to see he who once was an EAB sponsored Action Child now a Mission worker. If he does well he will be a pastor one day.

After this we recognized the three new pastors, Betinho, Léo and Fabrício Junior. Each one was given probational pastoral status and each one was prayed over separately. This was followed by Philip giving a run down on our annual statistics which show we continue to have 89 churches with 24 largish, 26 medium and 39 small church plants. The total number of Christian participants in these churches is 3,202. Philip also gave some explanations on how to use the software programme he has created to administer our churches.

Following this Pastor Lindon Carlos gave us an update on all the projects, what's been done in the last year and what's planned to yet be done this year. We also received some feedback from José Renildo and Tania in Portugal. We then decided that we would have a leaders' Conference day online in September and a youth conference online in November. We also decided that we will not hold the usual 10-day evangelistic outreach in January owing to the pandemic but we will hope to hold our next general conference in-person at Green Pastures Nature Reserve and Christian Conference Centre. This is planned for a year from now from the 27th to 29th of May, God willing.