> Greetings from China. We just spent time at a registered city church with a weekly attendance of 3,000 that has a vision for it's city and the surrounding counties. That church is an outreach focused church that has 193 preaching points. Each preaching point, as they call it, is a congregation. Some of those congregations are small and have 20 to 100 members, others are medium size with 100 to 500 members and others are large with 500 to well over 1,000. We saw 3 newly dedicated beautiful churches on Saturday. We also saw the site for a proposed new church to be built for a congregation of 400 members. These girls are anxiously waiting their new church.

> > > >

We have had another wonderful day visiting churches in China. This church has 13 daughter churches. The church combined with its daughter congregations have more than 500 attendees. For the Chinese new year, at the end of January when family members come home from working in the cities, the attendance often doubles.

This rural county has 248 churches. Praise the Lord. Please pray for this church as it needs more Sunday school teachers, quality teaching for its leaders and financial support for the leaders of the mother church and its daughter churches. Today the leaders do not receive any compensation even though they are dedicated to their church,

China is a beautiful country. It is spring time and the landscapes are green with crops.

We are having a blessed trip even though weather caused some of us a whole 2 days of travel to get here. Many of us visited the Bible School. The Bible School is important to train much needed pastors. A neighboring province reports 5,000 churches but only 100 pastors. The Bible schools are training Pastors (3 years of study) and Elders (4 months of study), so it takes time.

The rural church is financially poor but they persevere with faith. It takes 8 families to pool their land resources to provide the building site for a church.

The elders report significant and positive change from the existence of the church - families are healed, there is less conflict between people, and even streets are better maintained by the people.

The Elder of this Church asks for prayer for the continual faith of his people as they must seek multiple jobs often requiring long trips to the cities and they are away from the supportive structure of the body of believers.