Planting new churches is a challenging job for any congregation. The existing church must commit time, energy, money, and especially well-trained individuals. The Bible encourages this hard work, even though it can be painful and tough.

Churches should make new churches just like disciples are expected to make new disciples. Our church planting strategy looks a lot like the church in the book of Acts, multiplying itself not just within a single locality, or state but across the vast expanses of the Roman Empire and beyond.

Our vision of establishing healthy churches that can reproduce themselves is a long-standing tradition that aligns with the original aspirations of Pastor Elmer’s father, Eduardo Lessa. His vision was to begin with a church in Parintins that would reach the community and beyond.

First Baptist Church of Parintins was founded by Pastor Eduardo over 70 years ago, with a strong vision to reach out to the community and beyond. Because of their heart for missions they took their model of discipleship through small groups and used it to reach their neighboring villages as well.

As a result there are new church plants that are second and third generation churches. Peniel Church was one of the second generation churches that took the ministry away from the Parintins area. With a regular attendance of 50 individuals, the church is steadily expanding under the guidance of our missionary Marcelo Paixão and his wife, Dailane Leal.

Many of our short term mission teams have been to Peniel to support the church when it was so young that it didn’t have a building to meet in. Many of you helped to encourage the young church through ministry to men, women and children as well as through financial assistance.

The church building process continued with First Baptist Church of Hebron, a church that was begun by the members of the Peniel congregation. This congregation serves as a testament to our aspiration of fostering thriving churches across the Amazon region that will in turn sow the seeds for future congregations.

We are working hard to develop a leadership pipeline that proactively engages the church body to be contributors, not consumers. We need to be stewards of the gifting that God has given us so that we will see the rewards of future churches in the Amazon and beyond.