Kingdom Seekers

(Life in Portugal)

On 6 January we celebrated that we’ve been living in Portugal for 6 months. Now that it’s already February, it will be 7 months this week. We are thankful that we are a little bit more settled now and we have more capacity to take on new things, like language classes, and starting new things in ministry.
Here are some updates on what our December and January entailed, before we tell you more about what we have planned for 2025.

Giselle and Mieke are two medical students from our church back in South Africa, who came to Portugal in their November/December holiday for a 3 week mission. They lived with us and we had the most amazing times of prayer and going out to evangelise.

In the second week that Mieke and Giselle was here, a young surfer from Germany, Luca, also joined us. The five of us did a Luke 10 mission every day, where we went out and asked God to lead us to the places and people He wanted us to meet. We reached out here in Matosinhos, Porto and we also went on day trips to nearby towns that the Holy Spirit led us to.

Every day we got to speak to, pray for and share the Gospel with many people in our area, as well as the nearby small towns that we visited. Some people responded and surrendered their lives to Jesus and some of them we could immediately connect and build relationship with, to disciple them further.

Babacar and Cenny are two of the guys that we reached out to during this time. After Giselle, Mieke and Luca went home early in December, we continued to spend time and walk with Babacar and Cenny.

Cenny came to our house almost every day in December and Babacar came most days after work and over weekends. We spoke about the Gospel and what it means to follow Jesus every day and we read scripture together. Cenny is from Germany, and Babacar is from Senegal, so we would read the Bible in English, then Cenny would read in German and Babacar would read in French, and then we would all ask questions and discuss what we just read. They also started watching “The Chosen” in their own languages while starting to read through the Gospels to learn more about Jesus.

On 4 December, we explained salvation and Baptism to them and then we prayed for them. They were both baptised in the Holy Spirit and after that they both said that they want to get baptised in water aswell. So on 15 December they both got baptised in the icy cold ocean on a cold winter day.

It was a beautiful celebration and we have loved spending all the time we could with them in December. It is amazing to see how Jesus pursued each of them and prepared them long before we met them. They have grown so much in their faith already and we are excited and expectant to see what God will still do in them and through them this year.

The rest of our Desember was filled with people, celebrations and many dinners and events. We had a beautiful and special Christmas service and we even had our own choir singing and leading us in worship.

On Christmas day Andre and I hosted a lunch and invited many people from our community who were far from family and didn’t have anywhere to be on Christmas. We were about 20 people. We tried to cook some South African food and we had a lovely day together. The younger part of the group stayed and played games until late in the evening.

Early January Cenny had to go back to Germany to be with family and to attend a Christian conference in Germany with Luca. He got a job and he is working hard, but he wants to come back to Portugal to come and do an internship here with Surf Church.

When January started Andre and I decided to slow down, get quiet and consecrate ourselves through prayer and fasting to focus on God and align our hearts with Him for this year. Our church also did a 21 day fast from the second week in January, together with all the churches in Portugal, to pray and seek God together.
We continue with the weekly prayer meeting we have at our house and we love growing in prayer together with our Surf Church community.

Andre preached at Surf Church for the first time on 12 January about prayer and hearing God’s voice. We really saw how the Holy Spirit spoke to and touched many people during the service and many people responded with more faith for the fasting and prayer time that we did together.

Mieke and Giselle gave some feedback at our church in Pretoria about their mission and time in Portugal. We got to join them online and we could share and connect with our church back home. We miss Revolution Church and all our people there so much. We are thankful that we can stay connected and that they continue to support and partner with us. We look forward to continue partnering and working together to see God move in Portugal.

On 13 January we finally started with Portuguese classes. We found a great school with a wonderful teacher in our area, not too far from our house. This is really an answer to prayer. We looked for so long to find a school that we could have classes in person, that does not speak only Portuguese, but teaches in english and that is not super expensive. This school is still not cheap, but we believe God will provide because we know we need to learn the language.

We have class every week day for 3 hours and then we come home to do homework and study more. The first two weeks we completed level A1. We are now busy with level A2.1 and we have one more week left. Then we will take a break from the classes to first study and practice everything we have learned in these 4 weeks. Then we will do two weeks of classes for level A2.2 again in March. We enjoy the classes. It is really fun, but it is hard and our brains feel like they are exploding with all the new words and information.

We continue building deeper and stronger friendships in our community. Andre and I also recently started our own small groups for discipleship with some people in church.

We continue growing in our relationship with Samuel and we are excited to work and build together this year.

During December and January we stopped with the Sunday surf times, because it was just too cold and unpleasant, but we are planning to start again in February. We make the surfing open to anyone who wants to join and every week we have new people from outside joining us. This is a great way to reach and connect with new people.

Surf Church receives a lot of visitors and many young people who come here for short periods to serve and be interns with us, so we saw that there is a need for a more focused and structured internship program. So we prayed and we decided to start an official one year internship to train and equip young leaders in ministry. We have been busy planning, developing and designing the program. I will be responsible to lead the program and the interns, so our weekly schedule suddenly got filled with a lot more responsibility and work, but we are thankful, excited and expectant for what God is doing and will do in them and in us.

Luca and Cenny are coming back on 11 February to join our one year internship that will run from February until the end of November and they will stay in the house with us. There are also some other interns coming throughout the year for periods of one to four months, who will also join the program. Please pray for us as we are still busy preparing many of the content that we will work through and planning the calendar with what we will do when.

We are thankful for our life here in Portugal, even though we still miss South Africa and we still continue to adapt to living here. We keep praying that we will keep our eyes and hearts fixed on Jesus and that we will do only what He calls us to. We want to seek His Kingdom first and walk in what He has planned and prepared for us.