Us on Christmas in the Lobby of our apartment

Happy New Year everybody! 2012 has arrived! We spent New Years eve at some of our friends’ apartment who live on the 22nd floor. We could see a ton of fireworks going off in the whole city, all at the same time. Fireworks are legal here and a whole lot of people shot them off. It was neat to see all of the fireworks and get to spend some time with our friends. We didn’t even get used to writing 2011 on documents and we have to change again! Time seems to go faster and faster, maybe it has something to do with getting older. Derek recently celebrated his 27th birthday, and Audrey isn’t very far behind.

New Years is a great time to reflect back on the prior year, and look ahead to the next one. It’s a time to see what all we can do to improve ourselves, or change. We’re not real big on resolutions necessarily, but it’s good to evaluate how we do things, and seek to do some things better. This shouldn’t be done only once a year, but a fresh calendar year does allow for a clean break, or a fresh beginning.

We hope that you choose to follow God more closely and intimately this year. We seek to spend time with him daily, and see all that he has for our lives. We look forward to growth in our spiritual lives and seeing all that God has in store for this year. Serving and following Him are the best things we could be doing, and where he wants us to be is where we need to be! God bless and may 2012 be our best year yet!

Please consider joining us here in Panama through prayer. The January prayer calendar is located on the prayer requests and prayer calendar page. This month many different neighborhood names are mentioned for us to be lifting up. Thanks!

Derek and Audrey Tucker

Christmas Cookies!

What a wonderful time of year! It’s great to be able to spend time with friends and family during this season. We had several missionary kids over to our house today and we made Christmas cookies, and then went swimming. Not a combination you can do everywhere during this time of year. We’ll get together with several other missionary families tomorrow for lunch to celebrate Christmas together.

The world wants to try and commercialize Christmas, and they have succeeded in a lot of ways. But we hope that each of us remembers why Christmas exists. This time is supposed to be a time to remember the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. It’s only through faith in him, through his birth, life, death and resurrection that we can have eternal life. He’s the real reason for this time of year. We hope that we can take time to spend with the Lord during this busy time of year.

Wherever you are and whatever this season finds you doing, we hope that God blesses you all in incredible ways. Have a great Christmas and Happy New Year!

Derek and Audrey Tucker

As many of you know we decided to invite our neighbors over for a Thanksgiving dinner. We weren’t sure how many people would accept the invitation and come, but we had a pretty good turnout. There were 9 people (including us) for Thanksgiving dinner! We were the only ones from the USA, so we shared what all Thanksgiving means and why we celebrate it.

From the 9 people that were there, 7 different countries were represented: Italy, Spain, Venezuela, Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, and the United States. We had a great time sharing our US tradition with our neighbors, and getting to know them a little better. We hope that we can have a lot of other chances to get to know them, and share the love and truth of Jesus Christ with each of them.

We hope that we can have another get together with our neighbors in January. We think it would be neat for each person, or couple, to bring a plate of food from their home country. We are excited about getting to know our neighbors and we are hoping that through the relationships that were developed on Thanksgiving night that we can share the love of God with them. Please pray for our neighbors that came: Antonio and Maria, Quim and Marta, Teresa, and our friends Daniel and Melisa.

We do indeed have a lot to be thankful for! God continues to bless us and many of the things that we’re doing down here in Panama. We hope you are doing great and have a great week and a great Holiday season. We love this time of year! Take a look at the December prayer calendar on the prayer request and calendar page.

Thanks for keeping up with us. Feel free to write or call us to let us know how you’re doing. God bless.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

The Holidays are a great time of year, we like them a lot. Our house has been decorated for Christmas for a week or two now. We definitely enjoy Thanksgiving too. Not only because it’s a great reminder to be thankful for all the blessings that God has given us, but also because we can enjoy a lot of food!

This year will be a little different than some, but we look forward to it. We’ll be having lunch with some other missionaries, and it looks like it will be quite a feast!

Thursday evening we invited some of our neighbors over for a Thanksgiving dinner. None of them are from the USA, but we wanted to try and get to know them better. We have neighbors from quite a few different places. On just our floor we have neighbors from Columbia, Spain, Italy, Venezuela, and Panama. What a diverse group. We hope that we can get to know them better through the dinner we’re inviting them to, hopefully some of them will come! We don’t know if people will come or not, but we definitely won’t find out if we don’t try!

We ask that you pray for this dinner. As far as we know, none of our neighbors are Christians, so this is a great chance to get to know them, and share God’s love with them. We look forward to whatever God has in store! Thanks for the prayers and we hope each one of you has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Derek and Audrey Tucker

Tobias being baptized. A church is being started in his home.

They worked with several different church planters: Efrain and Fulvia Del Cid, Carlos, Noel, Higenio, Juan Carlos, and Norma. Our focus for all our volunteer teams that come in from the USA is to pair them up with different Panamanians, and have them work together. This way, the follow up and next step of ministry is done by the Panamanian church planter that works alongside the volunteer group. These Church planters are doing an amazing job and God is doing so much through them.

The team worked in several different areas of town: Don Bosco, Caledonia, Santa Fe, and El Cangrejo.

They did quite a few different things as well: Children’s activities in a park, door to door evangelism, handed out bottles of water at a parade, prayer walked, and mapped out several areas of the city.

You can tell the group was pretty busy. The most exciting part of the week was a Baptism service that was held Sunday morning at a nearby river. Four people were baptized as we celebrated together the new life that these four people have in Jesus. They are attending two of the different churches that Panamanian Church planters have recently started.

Mostly we’re excited about what all God is doing here. He is orchestrating things that we never thought would be able to happen. We are so fortunate to be a part of the wonderful things he’s doing in and through the lives of many different Panamanians. Please pray for the work here as God opens more doors for ministry, and as we see how we can best serve him.

We’ll try and post again soon to tell y’all more about what all is going on here. Check out our pictures page as we continue to put some new photos on there. We’ve also added our November praise calendar to the “prayer requests and calendar” page, feel free to check it out and join what all we’re doing here through prayer! Thanks for keeping up with us, God bless!

Derek and Audrey Tucker

Grettel singing a tribute to all her friends

We hope that you’re doing great. We wanted to share a neat story with y’all about our friend named Grettel. She is a professional singer here in Panama. She has been a Christian for 2 years or so and this past weekend she celebrated her 26th birthday with a Birthday party. She invited us to her party along with many of her professional singer friends, TV and music producers, and other famous or important people like a past Miss Panama! We felt like we were at a VIP type event!

The purpose of her Birthday party was to get her friends together, many of which are non-Christians, and share Christ with them. She did a tribute to her singer friends by singing their songs, and afterwards shared a story about King Solomon. She shared that Solomon could have asked for many things from God, but he asked for wisdom. She talked about how his physical belongings were not eternal at all. After she told her story another guy went up and shared an evangelical message. It was really awesome to see them sow a seed without shame and without fear to the type people that many would be intimidated by.

Some people paid pretty close attention, and others didn’t seem to listen too much. But God had his way of catching their attention.

Once the party was over. Some of her friends went outside and discovered that one of their cars had been broken into and some electronics had been stolen. The police showed up and called some other police who eventually caught the 2 young boys who had stolen the items (11-13 years old). The friends got into a car and drove to the police station to claim the items that were stolen and to talk to the boys who had stolen them. One of the boys was asked why he stole the items and he replied, ”Because I have no wisdom.” That is a strange thing for a young teenager to say, don’t you think?

One of the Grettel’s friends, who isn’t a Christian, and hadn’t really paid much attention as the gospel was shared at the party, heard what the boy said about wisdom and something clicked in her head regarding the story that Grettel told about Solomon. God used what the boy said to get her attention and show her that he had a plan, and wanted her to listen to it!

Also, one of the friends that was there was a Christian, and shared with the two boys about who Christ is, the love that he has for each of us, and how we can have eternal life through him. The two young boys, who had stolen the stuff, and were quickly caught, both accepted Christ that night in the police station!

How neat is our God? Who knows what kind of situations he wants to use for his Glory. One of our friends often says “our disappointment is God’s divine appointment”. Isn’t that so true! God has a plan to use whatever situation we’re in for his glory, I hope that we’re attentive enough to see what he wants to do and obey!

Derek and Audrey Tucker

If you’d like to hear some of her songs go to www.youtube.com and type in the search Grettel Garibaldi.

The graduates of the Church Planting Institute

There really have been a lot of great things going on here the last month or so. We have many things that we could and should post about! We’ll try and start posting more often so that we can share more neat stories of what all God is doing here.

One great thing is that we recently had another Church Planting Institute graduation. This class had 13 people who received a diploma, and 6 people who received a certificate of participation (these 6 weren’t able to attend 80% of the classes, which is needed for a diploma).

At the graduation many different students took part by reading scripture, sharing a testimony, praying, or reflecting on the word of God. It was a great time to see all that God has done in this group, and all that He will do through them in the future! Training folks like this has been an awesome blessing for us.

We will be starting another 6 month Church Planting class this Thursday in a part of town called Las Americas.

Also, we are working with a volunteer team from the USA this week. The church planters in charge of this area are Efrain and Fulvia Del Cid, and Carlos AKA “Tito” (Titus in Spanish). There is a picture of them three from the post on September 1st.

These three started a Bible Study in the home of Fulvia’s parents about a month ago. Last Friday night they had 25 people that attended the Bible study, and 4-5 people accepted Christ! What an exciting time. They realize that the growth of their group will quickly cause them to outgrow the home they are currently meeting in! What a great problem to have!

Pray for them as they follow up on many new contacts that they’re making this week while the volunteer group is here. We know that God has an awesome plan to do great things through people such as Efrain, Fulvia and Carlos.

We’ll post some pictures of the weeks events, and other things that have been going on soon, stay tuned!

Derek and Audrey

Several Church planters from our intensive church planting class

Hey everyone,

We have had a great month of August. We’ve been able to do quite a few different things. Here is a bit of what has been going on.

We got to go to Houston for a couple of days for Derek’s moms’ wedding. We enjoyed meeting her husband Larry, and visiting with a lot of other family and friends during our few days there.

We have also been involved in a couple of different church planting classes. We ended our 6-month course last week, and we have been teaching an “intensive” church planting class on Sundays. This class on Sundays has 10 students who came to us wanting to learn how to church plant. They are already doing the work, but wanted some training, so we are training them and helping them as they church plant. Out of these 10 people we really feel like God will start multiple churches pretty quickly.

This group has been really fun to work with. They’re excited about what all God is doing and is going to do through them. For more information on this group of church planters go to: http://urbanpanamateam.blogspot.com.

One of the things we enjoy a lot is our “coaching” time that we provide for our students. After completing the church planting training, we try to keep up with each student and meet with them at least once a month to see how they’re doing and what all is going on in their ministry. This is a really great part of our job as we get to spend time with a lot of different Panamanians, praying and encouraging them, and getting to know them better.

Another thing that’s going on is that we recently started teaching an ESL class at the University of Panama. We’re teaching a group of students who are pretty eager to learn more English. Our hope is that this group will develop into a small group who meet together to study the word. We teach them English, and we have a brief Bible study at the end of our teaching session. Last week we had 8 students, this week we had 12. Most importantly, we hope to be able to share the truth of the Gospel with each of these students and see lives changed through this. There are quite a few of our students who aren’t Christians.

That’s a few of the things we have going on. We appreciate the prayers in each of these areas. Please let us know if you have any prayer requests as well, and feel free to drop us an e-mail or give us a call anytime. Thanks for keeping up with us,

Derek and Audrey Tucker

A view of part of the Panama City skyline

Hello again everyone!

The last two months have been our busiest time thus far in Panama. We have had a ton of stuff going on, but it has been great! Here’s a few things we’ve done (not just us but the team of three families that we work with): hosted 8 volunteer teams that were here between one and three weeks each, had a church planting banquet for church planters, had several block parties in different parts of the city, prayer walked several areas, mapped out several areas, taught class at the Church Planting Institute, added two new classes that we’ll be teaching, Derek preached at a local church on a Sunday morning, we’ve been a part of various different meetings with other missionaries and locals, etc! It has been a time of an unprecedented amount of activities for us, but we saw God move and work in some awesome ways!

During this time of activity, we were reminded, what is our goal? We need to make goals in life, right? We need to have a direction that we’re going, don’t we? We have found that if we’re not careful our short term goals of what we’re trying to accomplish a certain day or week often overshadow what our ultimate goal in life should be: to seek Jesus Christ and glorify him in all that we do.

Recently we were reminded of the verse Matthew 6:33. We’ve probably shared it before, but God continues to bring us back to it. “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you as well”. God wants to take care of all the details of our lives, but we’re so often distracted instead!

Whatever we’re up to, and wherever we live, if we call ourselves a Christian, Christ should be the NUMBER ONE GOAL IN OUR LIFE, no excuses, no other way around it! We have found this last month that there have been times where our activities have taken priority over God. That should not be.

Even though the activities were good, it’s important to remember what is better, and the ultimate goal, Jesus Christ. We’ve realized this and committed to try our best to not let it happen again. That doesn’t mean we won’t do all these activities, but it means we’ll continuously try to focus on Christ first. We hope that you’ll do the same in your life, whatever you have going on.

We hope that each of you is doing well. We have been encouraged over and over again that God is in control, that he has a purpose and plan for each of us, and that he wants to use us in a unique way. This has encouraged us, and we hope that you allow God to speak to you and work in your life as well!

Thanks for keeping up with us. We continue to update our photos page. Feel free to send us an e-mail or give us a call anytime.

Derek and Audrey Tucker