Making New Jerusalems

By Pastor Larry Creamer

Last year I met Pastor Dhemetrio Dantas da Silva. He had been at First Baptist Church of Anori for six months and had already begun to start churches in four other places. We visited each of these places on that trip. However, Pastor Dhemetrio had a very great need. He had no boat. For us a boat is a luxury but for people in the interior of the Amazon basin, where the rivers are the highways, a boat is as necessary as our cars.

I came to Valley after the trip last year and challenged our people to purchase a boat. We raised $3000 in two weeks and sent the money to our missionary Fred Harner. Fred and Pastor Eli helped find a boat and motor.

Pastor Dhemetrio met us where the Purus River flows into the Amazon River, (several hours from his town of Anori) and went with us to Cuiuana. There, with the help of a Sunday school class from Westside Baptist Church in Gainesville, Florida, a floating house had been purchased to become a place for the new Baptist church to meet in that community. They have an older gentleman and a teenager who will live in that community and work with the people

On Tuesday evening we attended the dedication of the building with Pastor Dhemetrio and several of the people from the First Baptist Church of Anori who had come on a larger boat for the event. I was asked to deliver the dedication sermon. I preach from Acts 1:8 and emphasized how the church at Anori had reached out from their "Jerusalem" and that now Cuiuana which had formerly been a "Judea or Samaria" was now a "Jerusalem" and has a responsibility to take the gospel further and further in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The church sits on five big logs as it floats on the river. The interesting thing about a floating church is that when you get a lot of people in there as we had that night, the building rides much lower in the water. The floor near the back of the building was under a few inches of water.

The boat plays a large part in Pastor Dhemetrio's ability to reach these communities, which are several hours away from his city. For him to go to this community is equivalent to us driving from Appleton to Rochester, Minnesota.