This has been a pretty good week. Elder Vanva and I have been teaching the children of one of the first person I baptized, Ngaire Winter. We have been going around every Monday for FHE with their family and for the most part it was just a casual thing to get the kids to sort of like us and to build a relationship with them. Anyway, a week ago I challenged them all to come to church and stay for the whole three hours. And well, guess what? Every kid came to church and stayed! Tonight we hope to extend the baptismal commitment to them and see where it goes. But hopefully it goes well!
This week we have a lot of work set out for us, the bishop has asked us to go through the entire ward list and visit all of them to see who still lives in those houses and who has moved out without telling anyone. I was looking through the ward list and lets just say its heaps of houses. It'll be good though because this way we will find more less actives to work with and gain more trust from the ward leadership. But we definitely have our work cut out for us. Other than that we will try to spend our time working on the handful of referrals we've gotten from members and from the Visitors centre in Hamilton. Speaking of which, please please try your best to give referrals to the missionaries near you because that is where missionary work thrives! I was looking at the statistics for our mission last year, and I'm not entirely sure how it applies to the rest of the world but I think it is similar, and it said that 45% of the baptisms we get are from referrals. The next percentage is from part member families which was 20%. So please give the missionaries referrals!
Another event this week is that the Hamilton Temple just closed last Saturday and will remain closed until 2021. It's pretty disheartening for a lot of people here because it's the only temple in New Zealand. But along with that, the Visitors centre closed too. Much to Brandon's dismay too, he loved going for the firesides they held there.
But I hope everyone is having a great week!
Arohanui,
Elder Green
