Missão Xingu: Blaylocks in Brazil Hello Friends, We hope you all have had a wonderful May. Below are some family and ministry updates, prayer request, and the final part of the discernment process we have been writing about over the last few newsletters. We deeply appreciate your love, prayers, support, and communications. Know also that we pray for you all on a rotating basis and that we could not do this without you. Love, The Blaylocks Prayer Request
Donations:If you would like to donate to the ministry you can do so through through the mission’s secure giving portal here: Family UpdatesCelebrating Amanda In May we enjoyed celebrating Amanda. She is an amazingly Christlike woman who models the love and kindness of God to not only our family, but to the world at large. She is loving, kind, deeply self-sacrificing, industrious, virtuous, considerate, peaceable, and patient. We are fortunate to have her in our lives. Mother’s Day was a fun celebration with family time, homemade cake, whatever meals she wanted, a present with lovely homemade wrapping paper, games, fun, and being in our church community. We also sent her away on a three day solo trip so she could get some rest, spend some concentrated alone time with Jesus, and enjoy her favorite hobby. The kids and I held down the fort and had fun together why she got some well-deserved rest and quiet time. Graduation from Sustainable Faith When I was in grad school in Friend University I took a class called Introduction to Spiritual Direction. It changed my life and I felt the Spirit’s invitation to pursue additional training for three reasons. First, the ministry in and off itself can be deeply edifying and keep you spiritually healthy for the longterm. Second, is that our organization sees the need for additional pastoral and soul care resources for the pastors in our movement and I want to serve the broader movement in this manner. Finally, spiritual direction is more than a system of techniques, it is an entire posture and way of being that shapes and informs how I approach all areas of my life – discipleship to Jesus, discipling people in the way of Jesus, how I husband and parent, and (maybe especially important in this cultural and religious environment) – how I practice leadership. I have a lot more to say about this topic and will write extensively about it in future newsletters. For now, if you are curious, you can see my website which I made for our students and directees. In May I graduated from the School of Sustainable Faith’s two year Spiritual Director training program and have my official certification! Additionally, after Year One, the instructs discerned that this was indeed something God is doing in our lives and ministry, and I was invited to begin the process of apprenticeship which will ultimately lead to me becoming an instructor at the school with the goal of training future directors for the Portuguese speaking world. This is a part of the ministry we are undertaking in our church planting efforts here in Brazil and I am grateful to get to participate in this manner. Kids Update For a while we have been asking for prayer and discernment with regard to an activity for the kids to participate in. A donor approached us and offered to fund such an activity for them, and for that we are very grateful. Team sports organizations are much less common here in Brazil than they are in the States, and they generally tend to be organized as a social program by the government for low income families. Brazil does have a strong martial arts culture, and even founded its own style – Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We found a school specifically geared towards kids and families, let the kids take a few trial lessons, and have fully joined the school. They are having a blast and their teachers are wonderful. It also gives us another connection point in the community. Please continue to pray that the kids will be able to form some friendships and that we can be purposeful in moving from casual to meaningful to spiritual conversations with the other parents. Ministry UpdatesOur two initial groups are continuing to do pretty well. We are encouraged at the way things are progressing, and so often get to enjoy a palpable sense of the Spirit’s guiding and directing us. He is moving and at work! This last month was also a hard one for one of our groups. We want to respect their privacy here in this public forum, but will ask for your prayers. We had someone who was killed in an act of violence by a local gang. Please be in prayer for the family and our team as we navigate how to pastor well. Amanda and I have been able to make some new connections in the neighborhood where we live. We are in the process of getting to know these folks better, and are praying that we see how God is already at work in our new connections lives so that we might join Him in what he is doing. Pray the our relationships continue to progress leading to new disciples! I also had a conversation this last week a mature believer we met here. He has a similar heart for church planting, shared values, and is potentially interested in joining the work we are doing here. Pray for our conversations and discernment. Through a connection at Sustainable Faith we had an offer for someone who is trained in trauma, inner healing, and prayer ministry to come to Joao Pessoa and hold a series of meetings. As a team we decided to move forward with this given the immediate needs of the community of people we work with. Pray that those that are in need of meeting Jesus in places of trauma and wounding will show up, pray against the enemy as he will work to prevent that, and pray that we will be able to pastor well through whatever comes about as a result of the meetings. The Discernment Process – Part 3We have a number of new supporters after our last stateside assignment and wanted to take some additional time to explain our discernment process in more detail for those that are interested. In previous newsletters we described the deeply prayerful and communal interior work of discernment we undertook as part of this process. We used this quote from Howard Thurman to begin framing our discussion on discernment from his book Deep is the Hunger pg 178:
Howard Thurman is right. There is indeed a lot of discernment that comes as a “welling up from deep within the mind and spirit” that needs to be undertaken, especially as one approaches the middle age of life like we are. But, and this is important, there is also a fair degree of that “grand invasion of The Spirit” that comes from without and needs to be prayerfully and communally accounted for. We start with a few fundamental assumptions. First: It is the birthright of every disciple to hear the voice of our Father. We are deeply loved and He delights in speaking to His children. Second: The Bible shows us 6 ways in which God communicates to His people:
The first four of the ways in which God communicates tend to be rare, but are neither unheard of nor unbiblical. There is no shame in asking for them, and doing so does not mean you are unfaithful or that you in some way deficient in your trust in the Bible – it means you stand in a long tradition of Biblically attested to experince and tradition of God’s interaction with His people. The last two methods are the more normative ways and work in tandem. It’s probably safe to say that the last two are God’s preferred way of speaking because it bonds us to Him and to one another in community. (Thanks Keas for this point!) The fifth way is the most authoritative way – with the Holy Bible being ultimate authority and having final say in all matters of faith and practice. Our faith community also gets a say in both how we engage the Bible and in our inner voice such that we don’t get to just interpret what the Bible says on our own but must do so in community. But, the authoritative way in which God speaks (Bible in community) will never really be personally persuasive or effectuous in us unless The Holy Spirit witnesses and reveals it to us the 6th manner. They work in tandem. The same Holy Spirit who brought the authoritative inspiration to the Scriptures must also inspire us as to their truthfulness. (Notice how “spirit” is the root of “inspiration” and “inspire” – literally to be “in spirited.”) The Scriptures tells us to go and make disciples. For the “where” part of that command we had to lean on the other 5 ways in which God speaks in order to determine His will, and had to do so in a manner that was in agreement with Scripture and processed with our community. We received neither God’s audible voice nor an angelic messenger in this matter. We did receive a phenomenon (sans voice) in the miraculous appearance of a Brazilian coin sent as an encouragement to what we had already had confirmed to us by the Holy Spirit in both our community and in the inner person. I still have the coin and can show it to you and tell you the story. It is a precious reminder of God’s faithfulness to us. Both us and our community received dreams about the matter. The dreams given to our community specified that Northeast Brazil would ultimately be our destination. However, we did not learn of that until we had shared with the leadership that we were thinking Northeast Brazil is where we thought we would ultimately end up. In wide-eyed excitement they were able to share the dream God gave to one of the leaders here about His desire that the mission expand its work into the Northeast. That was a helpful bit of confirmation! My dreams were, truth be told, not especially dramatic or profound, but they did show me a few mundane events that would come to pass once we arrived and by which we would be more assured that we were on the right track. Two of those events have already happened since coming here and these have been encouraging. Northeast Brazil, however, is still a very large place, so further work was needed to finalize the city. When we lived in Macapa our neighborhood had a significant number of people who worked either for the military or the federal police force. Such jobs tend to be transient and many of these folks had served in many different cities. As Amanda and I literally prayed over a map of the country we narrowed it down to two cities in the Northeast. From there was asked God to send us neighbors who had lived and worked in both cities (Fortaleza and João Pessoa) with whom we could discuss. And He did! On the basis of those conversations we settled on João Pessoa as the likely location God was calling us to. We had been discussing all of this with our supervisor here on the field, and once we reached this point he took it to the senior leadership team who agreed that this seemed like what God was doing. They sent our family here on a scouting trip in April 2024. At this point we had received various levels on confirmation in 4 or the 6 ways in which God speaks to His people. Once we arrived in the city we spent several days in various parts of the city asking for the Holy Spirit to give us further guidance as to where He would have us move. We could tell immediately that the part of town where our AirBnB was located was definitely not it! Zero peace about that. The place in the city that we did feel the most peace about – we actually ended up coming back here twice during the trip to be sure and ultimately did feel confirmed by the Holy Spirit that this would be the neighborhood He would have us move into. On the basis of all that we submitted everything to the senior leadership for one final round of discernment, were approved, packed our house up, and shipped everything to storage here in Jamapa (our city’s nickname) while we went back to the USA for our stateside assignment and fundraising. Two weeks after we arrived back, while staying in a temporary rental, we saw that a rental house had opened up in the neighborhood we initially felt called to! After visiting the house and finding that it would suit our family well (which can be hard because most Brazilian families do not have as many kids as we do), we applied for the lease, were approved, and moved in a few weeks later – in the place where the Holy Spirit said we would. And thats the story of our discernment process. All in all, it was an extensive amount of interior work with God given community, and extensive amount of prayer, leaning on the Scriptures, and being open to receiving God’s guidance in all the various was he sought to convey His will to us. It was hard work, yet joyful work and we are grateful to Him for His loving and faithful guidance every step of the way. Peace to you!
© 2025 Derek Blaylock
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