Yesterday Puebla celebrated their 150th anniversary of The Battle of Puebla, which happened on May 5th 1862. Every year we have been present at the parade, but not to watch the parade, but to give out tracts. This time we made our own tract, explaining a little bit about the Battle of Puebla, talking about the freedom that we have, and then explaining the real freedom from sin that Jesus can give them. It was a total success! We saw very little tracts in the floor. All of them were taken and many people were reading them right there! Many asked for more. I heard a mom saying to her daughter: This is great for your homework! We printed 20,000 of these tracts. If you want the original files I can send them to you and you can give them out next year in your own town if you happen to have a parade of some kind for the 5 de Mayo.

5 de Mayo Tracts Front

5 de Mayo Christian Tracts Back

Our son Japheth giving out tracts - We gave 20,000 tracts in two hours for the 5 de Mayo Parade

A lady in our church giving out tracts during the 5 de Mayo parade in Puebla

People walking towards the 5 de Mayo parade in Puebla

Brother Jason Knabb and his family

This last Tuesday and Wednesday we had the Knabb’s staying at out house. Brother Knabb and his wife are serving the Lord in the south part of the state of Veracruz, in Jaltipan. They brought with them Brother Manuel and his wife and three kids. Brother Knabb and his wife Sarah (Sloan) have six kids! So, we had a total of 18 kids and 6 adults in our house… clearly outnumbered! Sarah was in Bible college at the same time I was, and I had not the privilege to know her husband that much, but few hours with them were enough to get to know them better and enjoy their company even more. Brother Manuel is a faithful servant that decided to homeschool their three kids — they also attended the Homeschooling Conference that I had a part of last week in Queretaro, where Brother Steve Miller serves.

The Munoz / The Knabbs / Bro Manuel, wife and daughter!

Some of the Knabb's kids and some of our kids

Me and the precious wife God gave me

Mother’s Day

Today we celebrated Mother’s Day at our church. We had 50 moms and they all got a rose, with a special note and a nice picture with a Bible verse. At the end we had cake and some fellowship. I preached 7 Great Things that we can Lear from 7 Great women in the Bible. They all enjoyed the service and we had a good time in church.

Mother's Day in our Church in Puebla, Mexico

Baptism Certificates

We also gave out some certificates. Some baptism certificates, some for those that finished the Basic Discipleship Lessons, and some for those that finished the Advanced Discipleship Lessons. In the picture is Sarah holding hers with Brother Miguel and Brother Cesar. They got baptized about a month ago.

Sarah holding her baptism certificate along with brother Miguel and brother Cesar

Our Big Conference

Please pray for our Conference. It starts tomorrow and ends on Wednesday. Our guest speakers are Pastor Luis Parada, Pastor Luis Ramos, Pastor Ezequiel Salazar and Pastor Kevin Wynne. If you are interested in the MP3 audio files of the preachings in Spanish let me know.

Sincerely,

Arturo Munoz and Family in Puebla, MEX

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May 07th by Arturo Muñoz

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This morning was a special morning. I had the privilege to baptize our own daughter Sarah. Today was also a special Sunday because we celebrated Easter Sunday — we celebrated the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We also baptized 4 other people of our church. What a blessing is to see our church growing in grace and in numbers. We had 99 adults during our Sunday morning preaching service (not counting the children’s church nor the nursery). Three of them were first time visitors and we had one person accepting Jesus as his personal Savior.

Our Daughter Sarah getting baptized

Youth Conference in Cuernavaca, Morelos

From Monday to Wednesday we took our youth group to a Youth Conference in Cuernavaca to Iglesia Bautista Monte Abarim, whose Pastor is Brother Alejandro Ramirez. We had 27 young people from our church plus another 20 from Brother’s Tim Aguiar’s church from East Puebla. A total of 50 attended the conference just from Puebla — What a blessing! — 10 years ago I only took one young man to a youth camp and now there are more young people saved and willing to serve God!

When I went to Cuernavaca to pick up our young people, Bro. Tim Aguiar told me that his mini-bus broke down. The bought a mini-bus few months ago and they helped us take some of our young people. Pastor Alejandro Ramirez let us use one of his fifteen passenger vans to bring our young people back to Puebla. So… I brought 25, and Bro. Tim brought another 25! Praise the Lord we were not stopped and everything went OK! Here is a picture of the ones I brought (missing three on the picture.)

25 in our 15 passenger van!

Couples Retreat in Toluca, Estado de Mexico

This last Thursday through Saturday my wife and I had the opportunity to attend the annual couples retreat that Bro. Victor Castillo organizes in Toluca. Bro. S. E. thought during the three days. My wife and I came back to Puebla blessed by the preaching of the Word and the fellowship.

Bro. S.E. and his wife, me and Nicole, and Bro. Victor Castillo and his wife

Bro. Manuel Garcia

Today we had Bro. Manuel Garcia, missionary to “maybe Puebla” preach in our church. Bro. Garcia has been a missionary in Guaymas, Sonora for the last 7 years. God has put in his heart to visit the south part of the country of Mexico and see where He would lead him to start another church. We are praying for Puebla for more missionaries. Puebla, I believe, has the least amount of missionaries per capita in the country of Mexico. At the moment we have 3 IFB churches in the city. We surely would love for Bro. Garcia to come to Puebla, but we will wait to see what God has for him. If you don’t know were to go in Mexico as a missionary, please playfully consider the city of Puebla as an option. Please come and help us!

Bro. Manuel Garcia and his wife in our church

Bro. Garcia preaching in our Church in Puebla, Mexico

Thank you for all of your prayers! God bless you.

Sincerely,

Arturo Munoz
Puebla, MEX

More Pictures of Baptisms

Waiting for the next person to be baptized

Bro. Cesar

Bro. Miguel de Alba

Dana

Bro. Sabino

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Apr 09th by Arturo Muñoz

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Missions Conference

One of the highlights of our church is our Missions Conference. This time we had Missionary Ron Goodman and Nick Sutmaier. They did a very good job, and at the end of the conference, God allowed us to double our Faith Promise for the year from $6,000 dollars to $12,000 dollars. Lord willing we will be able to take on more missionaries.
Also, next semester we are having 5 of our young people going off to Bible College. We already support 3 of them with $50 dollars a month, and this will allow us to help the other two.

Faith Baptist Institute

We are now in the second year of our Bible Institute of our church. This semester we have 12 students that are studying hard in the institute. Three of them come from one hour away three times a week from a little town. They are a very poor family but are excited to learn in our institute. The cost for each student is about $100 dollars a month per semester. If God puts in your heart to help any of these students, it will be a real blessing for them.

50K Tracks For The Next Day Of The Dead

Every year, during The Day of the Dead, we give out 20,000 to 30,000 tracks at the main city cemetery. This coming year we would like to invite churches from the States to help us give 50,000 tracks during that same day, but in different cemeteries. It will be an exciting time to see all those souls going to the cemetery to place food in the tombs of their loved ones, and be able to give them a gospel track and try to win them for the Lord. Also, if your church could help us buy the tracks, which cost about $100 dollars per 10,000 tracks we will appreciate it!

Two Services For Sunday Morning

Starting January 17, 2010, we are planning to have two services for our church, since we do not have enough space during our Sunday morning meetings. The first service will be at 8:30 am, then we will have Sunday school, and then our 2nd service will be at 11:00 am. We ask you to pray for this as we need space and money to be able to build and expand our current auditorium.

Expanding Our Current Auditorium

Our small auditorium can seat about 100 people right now. We have about 150 people that come Sunday mornings and we don’t have any room available now. We are running out of space. We would like to build an auditorium that can seat 250 people plus a second floor with 7 classrooms to teach Sunday school. We have saved $5,000 dollars and we need an extra $15,000 to expand the auditorium and build a second floor for our church. Please help us to pray for this.

Subscribe To Our Blog

We would like to invite you to subscribe to our blog: www.reachingpuebla.com. We will be adding our prayer letters, pictures of our ministry and more current updates of the work here in Puebla. You can even drop us a note and maybe let us know that you are praying for us. We certainly appreciate your prayers and support!

In Christ,

Arturo Munoz

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Oct 24th by Arturo Muñoz

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Our 9th Anniversary

Yesterday we celebrated our 9th Church’s Anniversary here in Puebla, Mexico. Bro. Matt Johnson, missionary in Tula, Hidalgo,  preached for us for that special day. He did an excellent job. Bro. Matt and I attended the same Bible Institute (Oklahoma Baptist College). He was a Senior when I arrived in Bible college in 1992. Hard to believe that is almost 20 years ago!!!

We had 185 people in attendance. The highest attendance for our anniversary. We try not to promote our anniversaries or conferences in our church since we don’t fit in our small auditorium anymore! In one of the pictures below, you can see that there are actually 30 people sitting outside the auditorium trying to listen to the preaching. We had at least one young man saved that morning! Praise the Lord.

Every year we have our famous and almost “World Wide Known Carne Asada.” Ok. At least known in our World Wide little community. For nine years in a row we have had a special barbecue — Arrachera Steak. We ask people in our church to bring rice, beans (mexican beans), guacamole, salsa (very hot), pico de gallo, tortillas, etc. This time, about six ladies in our church brought their special hot, hot salsas to my table for me to eat. They just want to give their pastor their best salsa, and also their most spicy hot! So, every time I had a steak taco I told the sister that made the salsa: “ok, I am having your salsa right now.” And, wow, their salsas were super hot. I was sweating. I wish my wife took a picture to show you how red my face was. Nicole had some special aprins made with the name of our church and gave them away to those that helped in the event. Thank you for all your prayers and support many of you have shown towards our ministry.

(If you don’t support our ministry yet as your missionaries, and would like to do so, you can call me at: 760-494-7883, and I gladly can let you know how you or your church can have that opportunity)

4th of July

Last week on Monday, we celebrated 4th of July inviting all of the people of our church. Every year seems that more people come! I guess they really enjoy the hamburgers. We had a good time. People here in Mexico appreciate what the United States have done, specially when refers to missionaries. They know that missionaries have sacrificed their lives to bring the Gospel to Mexico and now, there is a fire for Mexico to send too missionaries to other parts of the World.

Bro. Frank Caseres

This last Wednesday we also had the blessing to hear Bro. Frank Caseres, from Atlanta, Georgia, preach in our church. He was visiting Bro. Tim Aguiar here in Puebla for a conference that he had. Bro. Caseres was a tremendous blessing. He preached a great message regarding a growing church. There is a picture of him preaching below in the gallery… check it out!

Thank you so much for your prayers.

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Jul 11th by Arturo Muñoz

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Arturo Muñoz, Pastor Luis Parada and Pastor Luis Ramos

This last Monday we started our Biggest Conference of the Year which is our “Conferencia de los Fundamentos.” This year we invited Pastor Luis Ramos from San Luis Potosí, Pastor Luis Parada from Long Beach, CA, and Pastor Alejandro Córdova from Celaya, Guanajusto. It was a great Bible conference to say the least. God blessed in a tremendous way and we had many testimonies from people that came from afar and also people from our own church that the conference was a big blessing for their lifes. We started our conference Monday afternoon with two preachings and continued with five sessions on Tuesday morning and two more preachings on Tuesday night. We had the same schedule for Wednesday. We spent over $25,000 pesos but it was well worth it. At the beginning of the conference we only had like $500 pesos and God provided exactly what we needed for the whole conference. I don’t know the exact number that we had every night, but it was probably close to 250 people. We were hoping to have over 350, but still God moved in a marvelous way. I would like to thank all of you that knew about our conference and that were praying for us.

Now that the conference is over, we are getting ready to start our building plan. We have over $13,000 dollars to do this and we are excited about expanding our auditorium. We know that it is going to be a challenge and we ask you to pray for this as well. If you would like in any way to help with this, please let me know. Every dollar counts! As well as every prayer! We will be updating you with our progress and we hope to finish this as soon as possible. Today we had over 160 people in church and there was no room to seat everybody in our small auditorium.

Mother’s Day

In Mexico, Mother’s day is celebrated on May 10th. Every year we invite all the mothers to come and spend a special day in our church. Today we had 46 mothers! Many of them were brought to church by Mrs. Medel, the lady that I spoke of on our last update. And every year we have two or three special gifts that we randomly give away to them. Two year ago we had a huge big nice microwave! This year we had over $100 dollars worth of gifts. Some small gifts include a nice 6×8 picture with a beautiful background and a Bible verse. We also give them one rose to each one of them. And then the three special gifts: A nice mirror with a light, a set of pans, and a set of pirex glass bowls, which we bought at Costco here in Puebla. Well… One of the special gifts went to Mrs. Medel — the lady I told you about last week — I believe God rewarded her efforts and faithfulness. Another special gift went to Mrs. Tere, which help Mrs. Medel with the Bible club that they teach every Saturday. (God also rewarded her sacrifice and love for the kids.) And the last gist went to a lady that has been faithful to our church for over a year now. She told me, Pastor, can I take the mirror home. I just like it! I said, if your ticket gets picked, you can take it! … and guess what happened? She won the mirror that she wanted, and she was very excited and happy!

Today we had two first time visitors and one man saved!

Please pray for me, as this Saturday and Sunday I am going to Mexico City to preach a missions conference with Bro. Clint Rardin.

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May 08th by Arturo Muñoz

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Ok. I will start by saying how proud I am of our daughter Rachel. She has been taking piano lessons since September last year. Yesterday she played the piano during the church offering and she did pretty good. I actually did not know that she was going to play the piano. I guess it was a surprise. Big surprise! She did a good job. I was able to record her and here it is.

Our Sunday Morning Crowd

Last January we had to take a big step of faith. We started our 8.30 am church service (we had to split our church services since there was no room for all of us at the 11 am church service.)  Some Sunday mornings at 8.30 am I wondered if we made the right decision. Some times I felt like canceling our 8.30 am church service. But praise the Lord we didn’t. We kept on going and now we are seeing God blessing that big sacrifice. Here is a picture of our 8.30 am Sunday morning service and another picture of our 11 am Sunday morning service. Both services were full and we give the glory to our wonderful God. Please continue to pray for our church so that we can raise $20k dollars to expand our current auditorium.

Our Church At 8:30 AM Sunday Morning

Our Church At 11:00 AM Sunday Morning

Visitors

We continue having visitors every Sunday. Before we only had people visiting our church Sunday morning, but now, a lot of times, we have people visiting our church Sunday nights. Yesterday we had 3 visitors in the morning and 5 visitors at night. One of them was a young man I personally led to the Lord 2 weeks ago. He came to church with his girlfriend. His name is Andres Ramirez and her name is Sarah. Please pray for them!

Baptisms

Also, yesterday I had the privilege to baptize 6 people. Here are their pictures.

Saturday Soulwinning

And here is another picture of our Saturday soulwinners! They are all in fire for God. We had 8 people saved Saturday! Actually that number is kind of low for this many soulwinners, but the area that we are visiting right now is very strong catholic. There is a catholic church right in the middle of the apartment buildings (as you can see in the picture below.) This area is known as Loma Bella (Pretty Hill) which really is not very pretty when no one want to hear the Gospel. Praise the Lord eight people got saved!

Soulwinners Group

Update on Nicole

She is doing fine. No contractions. A little tired of being on bed rest for two weeks now. This coming Friday we have a doctors appointment. Please pray that baby Caitlin (I think I spelled it right this time) will wait two more weeks. We are very excited to say the least for another baby girl coming to our family.

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Jun 14th by Arturo Muñoz

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Well, lately its been raining here in Puebla. Which is really unusual. Normally it rains during the summer time, and we are able to see the volcanoes full of snow all during this time.

Puebla is surrounded with 4 volcanoes. 3 of them are very close, and 3 of them are the highest mountains in Mexico! To the west, we have two very beautiful volcanoes, which are the Popocatépetl, an active volcano of 5,426 mts (17,800 ft), and Iztaccíhuatl which is 5,230 mts (17,159 ft). Don’t forget that Puebla is very high up too! We are at 7,000 ft over the sea level. We are able to see this two volcanoes from our house every day. They are behind our house and I really look forward for nice and clear days and see what God has created. It is really breath taking when you see them on very clear days. I remember one day driving to the church and stopping to take some pictures of the volcanoes. Right after I took the pictures I listened on the news on the radio someone calling and saying that he had been living in Puebla for at least 50 years! and has never seen the volcanoes so beautiful. I am glad I took the pictures!

Popócatepetl Volcano As Seen From Our House

Popocatépetl Volcano As We Drive To Our House

On A Clear Day - Popocatépetl Volcano (17,800 ft)

Anyway. I like taking pictures of the volcanoes. Here is a view of the city of Puebla with its 4 volcanoes.

Puebla, and its four volcanoes. Three of them are the highest mountains in the Country

Let me know if there is any volcanoes where you live. Do you live near a volcano?

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Feb 17th by Arturo Muñoz

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Soulwinning Group From Our Church in Puebla, MEX.

Last Saturday, during soulwinning, my wife and I had the opportunity to go out together. Going with my wife is one of my highlights of the week. I miss her when she has to stay at the house due to her pregnancy problems. But praise the Lord she is doing much better and Saturday we were able to win two people to the Lord.

Nicole Praying With Maria

She was able to speak to a lady named María. (A lot of Mexican ladies are named María, and also a lot of man…. like José María y Pavón – The guy who led the Mexican Independence about 200 years ago.) Anyway, she told us that she gets up at 4 AM to help her husband make bread and goes to bed at midnight. She gladly heard my wife explain how she could have eternal life and she prayed God to saved her. Nicole is a great soulwinner I think, mainly because she lets God use her life and her testimony. She also speaks very good spanish. I would say 99% with no American accent… or maybe a tiny little accent. Many don’t believe her first language is English.

Leading A Young Lady To Christ

I was able also to lead someone to the Lord. She was a young girl named Sandra. Many times, since there are a lot of JWs in the area, I tell them that we are not Jehova Witnesses nor Mormons. Few times I have said that to a Jehova Witness! Last week we found two houses, one after another, where they were JWs. It is sad to see them lossing souls to hell and knowking on doors all over Puebla. A Kingdom Hall was just build two blocks from our church not too long ago. I will try to post a picture or two of the building. It is so, soo sad. But, praise the Lord, we were able to speak to Sandra, and she gladly accepted Jesus as her Savior!

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Feb 08th by Arturo Muñoz

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During the last 10 Wednesday nights we have had a class called: First Steps, in which new believers take a Discipleship lessons. We only allow them to miss one class and Praise the Lord, all of them were faithful during all 10 weeks!

We will post some pictures later.

Dec 06th by Arturo Muñoz

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