20 Jul Newsletter from Karl and Mary Badalian – May and June, 2016
May and June, 2016
What a great couple of months we have had. We were fortunate enough to be able to spend some time at our home church in May and June. After leaving Mountain View, Arkansas we started working on a church in Seymour, about 40 miles east of our home in Nixa, Missouri. Our home church, Wilson Creek Baptist Church, has invested in starting a work in Seymour. The church building in Seymour was built in 1928 and is starting to show its 80 year old age. The building original is about 30 by 50 feet sitting on a basement. A foyer had been added to the front of the building with two bathrooms sometime after indoor plumbing became fashionable in this part of the country. The original sanctuary area of the building is in usable shape, but the basement is not. We had to completely gut the basement to get rid of moldy sheet rock, an old plywood ceiling, and termite eaten walls.
There was a stairwell from the sanctuary to the basement which was too narrow and had to be rebuilt. That involved tearing out and rebuilding the old stairwell walls and widening the bottom half of the stairway. In order to make the building more inviting and usable we have started working on the entry way and foyer area. We put both bathrooms on one side of the foyer area leaving the other side to be used for a nursery. We also tore off some old paneling from the foyer walls and replaced it with sheet rock.
We also enjoyed helping our home church with youth camps in June. Our junior youth camp was the first week of June. Mary and I moved our trailer to the camp so we could be on site. We cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for the campers and helped in other ways whenever we could. A couple from our church, the Fortners, did a great job with the teaching part of the camp, they also decorated the place and coordinated activities. Lots of folks from the church were there to help run the junior camp. The last week of June we take our older kids to Silver State Baptist Youth Camp in Colorado. Pastor Moody and I share the duties of driving the bus to Colorado and back. We have several families from our church and adults that go with the kids (over 50 folks this year). It is such a great time of relaxing, listening to preaching, and fellowship. We were privileged to see souls saved and decisions made while at camp.
Thank you for your prayers that keep us healthy and provide for our safety while we are helping other churches. Your love for other churches makes it possible for us to help folks across this country to improve their facilities while saving money which will be used for the Lord’s work in other areas.
(Where we are headed: Mountain View, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Concord, New Hampshire; or wherever God directs.)