(a recent prayer letter from Joshua and Amanda Allred, Mexico)

September and October have been months of encouraging growth for us. The Lord has been blessing and we have slowly and gradually been emerging from the pandemic.

In August, we had a Covid outbreak in our church. We had over twenty families infected with the virus. Thankfully, the outbreak came to an end several weeks after it began and everyone recovered well. Mexico as a whole has been doing better and the government restrictions have finally started to relax. Mexico has been using a red-light system since the pandemic began to measure each state’s status, with red being the most critical and green being the least critical. As of this week, the federal government has classified Yucatan as a “green” state. In fact, there are only two “yellow” states and one “orange” state left in the whole country. People are beginning to feel much more comfortable and restrictions are starting to ease, though they have not been lifted completely. On Sunday, we were able to increase our seating capacity at church and move from five services per week down to three. The members were so excited to see more people in the services again!

Our evangelism ministry has been growing. An average of 40-50 church members have been going out with us every week to knock on doors, pass out tracts, and share the Gospel. In the month of October, we had the privilege of seeing many people make professions of faith, several first-time guests visit the church, at least six people get saved in church services or Bible studies, and nine people get baptized!

Our discipleship ministry has also been growing. In the last few months, we have had over forty new people start taking discipleship classes for the very first time.

I mentioned in our previous letter that our seminary’s fall semester began in August. We moved into a brand new classroom and had a total of twenty-eight students enroll and begin taking classes, breaking the seminary’s record for the highest enrollment ever! The semester has been going well and the teachers and students are all excited about their classes!

In October, we hosted the Martinez family, missionaries to Israel. What a blessing and a challenge it was for our people to refocus on the Lord’s global mission!

Since the pandemic began, we have been unable to hold our regular annual Men’s Retreat, Ladies’ Retreat, Youth Camp, or Vacation Bible Schools. We are planning to kick these back off this year with a Men’s Retreat in November. We already have over sixty men signed up to go. Our theme will be “Refocusing on our First Love.” Please pray that this will be a revitalizing time for our men and our churches.

We appreciate your constant prayers for us and our church members! Thank you for all you do to support our ministry in Merida. May the Lord bless each of you in a special way!