Dear Family,
This week has gone rather briskly; we've spoken with more people than
ever--between the two of us we spoke with 1% of the population of
Leones this week (about 100 people).
Yesterday we went to San Marcos, a neighbouring town where the branch
president lives. We found a fellow named Pablo, whom we had waken up
from the siesta, who had very good questions. I got a bit excited--for
example, to the question, "And what makes you think that Christ
organized a church during His earthly ministry?" The answer was a
20-minute ramble along the lines of, Paul speaks of "one Lord, one
faith, one baptism," we see in the book of Acts how the Church that
Christ established (see "And upon this rock...") continued functioning
as an organization (e.g. filling the vacancy in the apostleship,
councils on doctrinal issues such as proclaiming the gospel to the
gentiles, matters related to the Law of Moses, etc), and also the Lord
in modern revelation ..., etc. We gave him a copy of Joseph Smith
History that we had printed out--we'll follow up this week.
The branch is doing well. Yesterday we had the a branch family home
evening--the first in a long time--and watched Mountain of the Lord.
We're starting to invite members to teach with us more actively. Also,
we have lunches with the members almost every day this week--we're
improved since I arrived; en aquel entonces we had one or two each
week no más. The branch is rather autosuficiente--sólo faltan más
personas. Hay buenos maestros y presidentes de las organizaciones,
pero faltan consejeros, etc. Habitualmente dirijo la reunión
sacramental y ayudo con todo lo que tenga que ver con la computadora
(finanzas, cédulas de miembros, etc). We still only have about 20
people coming to church each week, but we've calculated that if
everybody who mostly comes came every week we'd almost have 35.
On a side note, Elder Cranford and I have been making bread. Today I
made a loaf of about 60/40 white to whole wheat bread; we're quite
satisfied with the development of our cooking skills and plan on
making bread next preparation day to give as gifts to members. The
challenge right now is finding the bread pans!
Love,
Elder Schlachter
