Edna and Leão are the regional supervisors, and this was the third annual conference under their leadership.
The Porto de Moz Central Church now has two rooms with air conditioners! They put them in the day before we arrived. They are hard workers, and we are so grateful!
The work in the Xingu started in 1992 with this Porto de Moz church. Luke began to make survey trips with Nilton to the Xingu the same year he invited Deanna and me to Brazil. It took us a year to arrive in Santarem and two more years to learn enough language and culture to start the mission in Altamira. Nilton got sick, so Clenildo, his brother-in-law, offered two days by boat from Santarem to Porto de Moz. Clenildo and Angelita were in their first year of marriage and had a three-month-old firstborn child. Nilton and Cleuci, Clenildo’s sister, traveled back to their home in Santarem so Nilton could get medical treatment. Clenildo and Angelita never moved back to Santarem. We became friends and moved to Altamira together in 1995/96. Altamira is the regional center city with an airport, TransAmazon Highway, universities, and hospitals. It was ideal for us to host short-term teams and start a church-planting movement.
We had about 20 adults and four children, and one bathroom. Everyone had to be ready for the bus to get to the meetings at the same time.
We took a 14-hour big line boat on our way down. We took this 4-hour faster public transport on the way home.
Valdinho was the first person I met in Porto de Moz 1994 on our first survey trip. He married a rancher’s daughter who has this beautiful daughter, Kanandra. She was busy cooking for this event, feeding 300 people for Friday-Sunday. Valdinho served tirelessly doing 101 things like clean-up, details, set-up, and just making sure things ran smoothly. Valdinho and the clean-up team allowed the others to give and receive ministry yet he was always ready to stop and talk to help someone along their way. Servant Leaders. Valdinho showed me a photo of about 35 people with whom they are planning to plant a Discovery-Group-Evangelized church very soon.
Servant Leadership – Valdinho used to be our most authoritative, directive pastor. Since he is pretty gifted, his small-town church grew to about 200 people, which looked like a success story. But it didn’t last. He is now still zealously serving God with his whole heart but as a servant leader. He was the most unlikely candidate for a different leadership style, but now he never tires of discussing the effectiveness of servant-leader Discovery Groups.
Winston, B., & Fields, D. (2015). Seeking and measuring the essential behaviors of servant leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 36(4), 413–434.
This is Nazaré, Valdinho’s first mother-in-law. In the 1990s, we often stopped at their buffalo ranch in a vast, remote swampy region. We had a wooden church on stilts next to their house. She used to stand in the front of their small canoe with a harpoon while her husband or one of her children paddled, and she was a famously good fisherman. Since then, her husband died of a heart attack, her daughter, who used to be Valdinho’s wife, died of cancer, and one of her sons died suddenly of covid. Thankfully she had a large family. These people suffer and live in ways we cannot imagine. She came to this meeting to see us and Clenildo.
Ianna and Bene are the senior pastors of the biggest Vineyard church in Porto de Moz. This church was struggling with about 20 attendees only a short time ago. They are a zealous group now and working to reactivate the river churches.
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