Blessings and Challenges for the Divito Family

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My family is grateful for all of your continued prayers for us as we prepare to serve Christ as missionaries in South Africa. We have been staying busy traveling and introducing our African ministry to churches, pastors, and brothers and sisters in Christ. Over the past couple of months, I have preached or presented at six churches and been involved in three conferences. I have added a few thousand miles to our vehicles and enjoyed meeting so many who are excited to hear about the opportunity to equip African pastors. For many of you, this is the first prayer update that you have received, since we have officially hit the milestone of 230 prayer partners! We rejoice in God’s kindness to us as we seek to glorify Him.

Additionally, we are thankful to announce that Jennifer and I have been accepted as missionaries to serve through Faith Global Missions (FGM). While Heritage Baptist Church is our sending church, we look forward to FGM helping us with the logistics of entering the mission field. Again, we see God blessing our family by connecting us to a wonderful support team to assist us in our ministry.

At the same time, we have faced a few challenges. First, FGM has been helping us to reassess our financial budget as missionaries. In doing so, we have found a few areas where we had not budgeted sufficient funds. We now see the need to raise our monthly support goal by approximately $800 a month. And while we have received many generous gifts as well as a number of monthly support commitments, we estimate our current support levels at about 35% of needed monthly commitments and 20% of our start-up expenses. Second, the process of obtaining a South African visa has become quite difficult, and FGM has said that it could take up to four months. All of this leads us to conclude that we will not be ready to move to South Africa by the beginning of December as we had been planning.

But this places our family in a difficult situation. Hoping to begin serving as missionaries before the end of this year, we had previously made some decisions in which I now find myself needing to find temporary employment to provide for my family as well as a short-term place for us to live. As a result, we feel our need for your prayers more than ever!

Is Christ sovereignly in control? Absolutely! So we do not consider these challenges a setback, but an opportunity to draw close to Christ as we depend on Him and His timing. At the same time, we feel the difficulty which African Pastors’ Conferences faces, since they are currently carrying out conferences without someone to manage them. With this in mind, will you regularly bring our family and APC before the throne of grace for wisdom from the Spirit in our time of need?

Lord willing, we are hoping to add a number of churches and individuals to our support team over the next few months which will bring us much closer to moving to South Africa. If you or someone you know would be interested in learning more about helping to bring biblical reformation to southern Africa, then please let me know. Above all, our desire is to glorify Christ through equipping African pastors to rightly handle the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15).

Because of His grace,
John Divito