Mature churches

Lourens and Marie Laureti are so thankful for your prayers. Through God’s grace, they are seeing the church in New Britain and New Ireland strengthened and growing, as well as starting to reach out beyond the local church and seeing the broader church in Papua New Guinea, united and growing closer towards self-sufficiency.

This year it is planned to have some leaders move out to Hoskins to minister full-time with Lourens. These men and their families are being sent by their churches as missionaries to work with him amongst the national churches in New Britain. This is a big shift towards independence for the national church in New Britain.

They will be completing the following curriculum:

– A workshop on, “The Church as God’s Image.”

– Teaching material on leadership development.

– Teaching material on marriage and family life.

– Teaching material to help the youth.

Five churches have asked for them to teach the leadership courses. They are also going to teach the youth workshop in three clusters, during which they will have many youths meet and get to know each other. They are doing a follow-up meeting on the Bible study workshop that they did last year, and this will then be adapted and implemented amongst the churches in New Britain. It is a lot of work and incurs expense in travelling and printing materials.

They are hoping to visit all the mature churches in New Britain to do an evaluation of each one of them. This will help determine the needs so that they can intentionally focus on those areas. This demands a lot of travel and time away from home. Pray for their families.

They plan to develop and implement a mini training course to equip the national families sent from their home churches to minister cross-culturally. This is a major development in Papua New Guinea. The three national leaders will be working on developing this vision with Lourens. They hope to eventually train and equip the national churches to reach the unreached in Papua New Guinea. They are now sending missionaries, and the focus is on equipping them! This has huge financial implications; please pray with them for investors.

A people group assessment is also planned in order to work with the churches in New Britain to develop a strategy to plant a church in a new town area. This again is a new initiative, driven by the national church in New Britain. A lot of prayer is needed!