trabalhando com membros

This week we put one of President Costa´s promise to the test; he promised us that the best missionary work is working with members and he gave us a scenario to put in practice: on friday or saturday go to the house of a member and look for their neighbors--pick a family that you see and then on sunday tell the members that you really feel like these neighbors need to hear the gospel then set up a date to talk to the members more about this. at the members house, plan a FHE with the neighbors, make invitations, and deliver the invitations with the members. Do basically all the work but do it with the members. He said that we as missionaries need to be more proactive and if necessary, do the work for the members/make the invitations/etc. 

So, on Friday, we went to the bishop´s street to see who we could invite to a family home evening in his house. We stood in front of his house and at first we saw no one in the street. Then we saw a car pull in front of a house a little bit down the road; a woman came out of the house to talk to her friend in the car. Sister Angulo then told me, ``I think that is the bishop´s old house.`` We then decided to go talk to them. Turns out the woman who lives in the bishop´s old house is from a part member family. She told us that her mom and sisters are members and she has been to church a couple of times. Sister angulo asked why she was never baptized, and she said she has to change some things first. She promised that she would come to church the next week because she would be traveling this sunday and the week of Christmas. We will set up a family home evening for the week she comes home and even better because our bishop is really excited to help us lately! He talked to us yesterday and told us that he wants us to help him get 200 members coming to church before next July; he told us 3 things that he specifically wants us to do--use our area books because he has seen that many times we loose some of our teaching pool when the missionaries are tranferred, do divisions with members every week, and help the ward rescue less actives. 

Also Luciana´s kids will be baptized this week. Luciana has also been inviting a lot of her friends to church. We were visiting one of her friends on saturday when we met two 19 year old boys who agreed to come to church the next day--and they came! Jadsom and Rafael went to church and then we taught them in the chapel with a member; it was a good lesson and Jadsom really understood everything. We also taught Valter, who is Irmã Raimunda´s neighbor who came to church with her. Valter is in his 20s and came to the Ward´s Christmas dinner and is really interested in the church. 

We are working a ton with the members here and it is going really well. We had another ward integration activity and a ton of members showed up along with a family that we have been teaching--they went to the chapel for the english class at 6:30 and stayed for the activity after and loved it. They just need to get to church on sunday.

We are excited for this week--hopefully we will find people home! 

Love you! Merry Christmas!

Sister Bledsoe