Happenings in Morelia: Cell groups

I thought I would give you all a little more info on what our cell groups are like. Last night, Summer and I had our weekly cell group at Blanca's apartment. Blanca was the first person in our church to decide to be baptized. The Lord has done some amazing things in her life, but that story is for another time. She is a single mom with two kids and lives in an apartment on the north side of town. We've been meeting in her place for almost a year now. The area that she lives in is FULL of hurting people who need a personal relationship with a personal God. But they are hard people to reach. What we've ended up having is a cell group of mainly kids, which is fine with us!
Anyway, a typical cell starts out with the welcome (bienvenida), which is a question for everyone to answer (something simple, like "If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?" or "Here's a piece of paper. Draw the animal that most resembles your personality.") The purpose of this is to help us all get to know each other a little better. After that, we have some praise time (alabanza) to help us focus on why we are there. After that, the kids go to their class and the adults start their time in the Word (Palabra). This is generally a discussion time where we can apply the Bible to our daily lives. So many people here think of the Bible as this really big book that sits on the shelf and collects dust and is passed down for generations but it never read. They don't understand that it is full of life and spirit! That is our focus during the word time. How does this affect me? After this, we have fellowship time. We always have snacks afterwards and sit around and talk and live in community for 30-45 minutes. The kids come back for that (like you can keep kids in any country away from cake or cookies!). Our night usually concludes with taking someone back to their house on our way home.
As I mentioned earlier, we have three cells meeting right now. Our cell is on Tuesday night at 7:30, the Gonzos (as we like to call them) have their cell at their house on Wednesday nights, also at 7:30, and the third group currently meets at our offices on Thursday nights at 6, with Aldo and Sandy as the leaders (I'll tell you more about them some other day). The group that will start in September will be meeting at Rosa's house (she is one of our older Christians) with Adriana and José Luis (also Mexicans) as the leaders. We don't know yet what day of the week they will choose to meet.
I thought I would also include some pictures from our cell last night. Yesterday was Blanca's birthday, so we had pozole, a typical Mexican soup with hominy and chicken, and cake. Sam González stopped by to celebrate with us. We also had some friends in town from Tennessee, so they came to cell. Enjoy the photos!
Sara