Leonard Report
Leonard Report
John Leonard
When missionaries come back on furlough. You think of furlough as vacation? Well, it's not. And as a quadriplegic, traveling around is very difficult.
And I'm not going to say we're going to invite you on a. But if you want to, when we travel, we'll put your name on the list. You can help Bev drive and you can go along with us and we'll make sure that you'll go for free.
Okay? We're not going to pay you. But there was one young man from St. Charles, Iowa.
He went with us for 32 days. And he saw a lot of western United States, Texas and Kansas and Nebraska and Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. And we were all over the place and we had a blast.
But speaking in churches and meeting new people. But that's why we come back on furlough to visit our supporters and friends. And when we say supporters, not only finances, but prayer, you think, oh, well, it's money that keeps the missionary on the field.
No money pays the bills, but it's the prayers that keep us there and that help us on the day to day. That is not the first picture. No, it is nothing.
Give us a second here. Okay, I know, but that it's the one with. When someone gets.
Okay. The city of. So look it back there.
Okay? We got a different back there. I'm sorry. Well, I'll turn around and I'll talk and you'll see the back of my head.
Covid set in. Aren't you sick and tired? When someone says Covid. But it's the truth.
It's reality. It's something that happened to our world. How it happened, where it happened, when it happened, who done it.
Hey, we're not going to go there. We all have our theories. It happened down here in the States.
We were without meetings. Some missionaries hunkered down and waited it out. We did not.
We bought plane tickets and left for Brazil. But right before we left, Bev was packing our stuff and broke her. We lived on the side of a mountain.
Bev was raised on a farm in Kansas at the end of dirt road. She went to a one room schoolhouse. You don't see that a lot.
Inner city Des Moines. And she's the girl that's going to go to the mission field with me. We got married and she did.
But anyway, she broke her foot. And we didn't live in a big city. We lived outside on the side of a mountain by an Indian reservation.
We had toucans. Not pretty pounds. How much do you weigh? Some of you weigh less than 140 pounds.
Well, capy vadas, the big ones, get up to about 140 pounds. And they'd come up and they'd like grass. They'd trim our lawn for us.
So there'd be a herd of 30 or so of them trimming our lawn. 03:00 in the morning. And we had a ton of different wildlife around, monkeys and snakes and lizards of all sizes.
And it was amazing where we lived and where we had churches. Then Bev broke her foot. I'm a quadriplegic, and they said, your son lives in so Paulo.
His wife works in a hospital. She's an RN in the intensive care nurse, and he's a teacher. You got to move by them, near them.
Don't worry about it. Bev has the book right here, and we'll go through there. Okay, good.
We're. We'll do good. He said, you have to move to inner city.
So, Paulo, we had a house. We had an acre and a half yard. We had fruit trees.
We had guava, papaya, mango, avocados. During avocado season, we'd eat all we could and give away all we could, but there'd be still a bunch of windfalls at the bottom of the tree going to mud. And the wildlife came and ate them.
But, oh, man, you know how much avocados are in Des Moines, Iowa? Well, we had them for free. We had all we wanted. And then God moved us to so Paulo, to an apartment seven stories up.
And so Paulo is a beautiful city. There's the rich and famous there. There's the very rich side of St.
Paul. Is that the. Okay, yeah, you'll have to look at the book.
God led us to Inga, which is a slum. And is that the same one that's up there? Okay. You just didn't.
You didn't receive it. You should have looked at it before. Yeah.
Got a pen drive. Oh, it's too late. Okay.
But we bought an old warehouse, gutted it out, remodeled it, and made it into our first church in a slum in Brazil. And as I said before, 23 million people, and a lot of them live in a slum. We do not live in the rich and famous part.
We live in the DMZ, or the zone between where the rich and famous live and the very poor, poor, poor, slum dwellers live. We live in a normal apartment building. Our address is on the back of our prayer card.
We don't make a big secret of it. Type it in Google Maps, and you will see the building that we live in. Okay? When people get saved, we do.
We do discipleship right up. Why? We are church planners. We are church planners.
And the quickest route from a ground zero binds a place, either an old building or a piece of land. And building a building and filling it up with born again believers and be turn it over to a national pastor and leaving. And that's what we do as church planners.
And here I am discipling this guy. We start as soon as we can, baptismal classes. And we baptize them right away.
And Bev does, too. Bev teaches the ladies, the children. We have VBSs.
And all the kids pop their heads up. VBS. I like VBS.
You guys like VBS? We have two VBSs a year down there. And all the adults. That's a nightmare.
No, it isn't. We do. We have two VBSs.
Abortion is illegal in Brazil. It's the largest catholic country in the world. There's a lot of children.
Usually when a lady is found with child and out of wedlock and all, usually the family helps raise the child, either a parent or an aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, brother, sister. Someone in the family just comes in and they gather together and they raise them one way or another. And you say, VBS.
And, boy, you can fill this right here was one fourth of the kids that came, okay? So we separate them into four ages, and this was one fourth of them right here in our auditorium. And I did games that year. It was a riot.
And if you want to know how I did games, boy, they enjoyed it. And they said, we want you all the time for games. But anyway, Monday nights, we have a community soccer stadium, and you'll see the slum in the background there.
So if you don't go to our book, that's what the slum looks like. It's just stacked on. And when a kid gets married or has a child or something, they just add another room up on top, and they just go up and up and up.
And sometimes it's not well built and it falls down and it's not good, but. And then we're called to do funerals. But hopefully that doesn't.
It doesn't happen that often, but the guys from the church call their unsafe friends and play soccer on Monday nights. We rent the place, and then we evangelize. We have guys in our church today, members active because of Monday night soccer.
Okay. And Bev takes chocolate chip cookies. They love that.
Okay, forward. Wednesday night. Wednesday night.
We are Wednesdays. Wednesdays we go over to the police barracks city of so Paulo. 23 million people.
51,000 policemen. 51,000 policemen. And I am a police chaplain.
And we go over there and minister to them. And our main goal, leading souls to Christ, making sure these policemen have Christ as their savior. And we enjoy it.
Here's another slum. This one here is a dangerous slum. This one here, you see crime a lot.
Homicides all the time. And Guacori is where God has led us to team up with another missionary couple and start a church. We rent a little piece of property and put a tent on it.
And this is our church, and we do visitation. We go early on Sunday afternoons, go up and down the alleys, and call one of the men from the church to do it. A person gets saved.
And right away that week, I say, hey, on your day off, we're going to go knocking on doors and calling people to go to church. They don't know any different. They think that every good Baptist does that.
So. And we don't let them in on the secret. The secret is this.
Every good Baptist should do that, but we don't always do we? Guess what? We have VBS there, too. It's a new work, so not that many kids. This is a little old house that's fallen down.
When it rains, you might as well go outside. You get wetter inside than outside. We like to leave music in the church.
Music makes the service. And Bev teaches piano, and we like to leave music in the church. This last four years, Bev taught six people how to play the piano.
Okay. Pardon me. Okay, dear.
We should have. Take the pen drive up there, please. Okay, I'll tell you this story.
My wife sent it this week, and it just didn't send. Right, so it's our fault. I was raised in Brazil.
My wife, my parents took me down there when I was. And my Bev is the clicker. Yeah.
Do you know how to forward it? Anyone know how to forward it? Grab it there. Don't forward it yet. My mom turned 80, so we went to her birthday party and lit 80 can.
No, we didn't light 80 candles. We lit some candles, sang happy birthday. My brother in law is a Brazilian.
He's a policeman. He retired. My sister's a schoolteacher.
She retired and they moved up. They moved back up where he was born, on a mountain where it's cooler. It was 102 in the shade when we left Brazil.
I would say that no one in the slum has air conditioning. Okay. I would say that 95% of the Brazilians do not have air conditioning.
Okay. So you say, well, if the air goes out, I'll die. No, you won't.
You'll feel like dying, but you won't. Okay. Anyway.
But up on a mountain, it's cooler. That's God's air conditioning. And they were driving an hour and a half to church.
Hour and a half from here is what, Omaha would that be about? Right? Especially if my wife's driving. But anyway, like, driving to Omaha for church and back every week, can you be an effective part in the church that way? No. My brother in law, he was a deacon for years and years and years.
My sister worked in Sunday school and all, and it wasn't working. So get your neighbors together. We went up there and spent three days with them.
Said, get your neighbors together. They have a big porch. I said, we're going to have a church.
We made a big old bonfire, and 41 neighbors came. I said, here you go, Mandy. Start a church up here.
You're a deacon. You know how to preach, you know how to lead a service, and you know how to teach Sunday school class. You know how to do a kids club to my sister.
And sure enough, before you know it, they said, we have a problem. They called me and I said, what is it? We ran out of room. That's great.
Let's build. I said, how? I said, well, we get on our knees and pray, and God will supply. And he did.
And we put this up. It's cute. I didn't design it.
I usually design most of them. My sister designed this one and her husband. It's about the size of your auditorium, right, Beva? Yeah.
Really? Yeah. I'd say about the same amount. Yeah.
Seats about 100. 2130. And we were there preaching.
And this family, unsafe family, walked three and a half miles up a mountain path to go to a church service and got saved. They walked three and a half. When was the last time you walked three and a half miles at one shot to go to church? Probably.
Some people probably do, but they did. And then they went back home. And on Monday, I said, you start the baptismal classes right away.
So they went there on Monday on their dirt bike, my brother in law and my sister. And when they got there to their mud hut, and there is something called adobe. Have you ever heard of it? Okay.
The adobe in Brazil is a mixture of clay, grass and cow droppings. You go to Iowa State fair. You saw cow droppings then.
Anyway, I don't have to explain it, but the fresh stuff, and you mix it, and then you make your walls. That's what. The walls of their house.
And then when it rains, your house smells like kalap. Okay. But they don't know any better.
They were born there and they die there. But when my brother in law and my sister got there, there were 15 neighbors. They didn't know any better.
Best thing in the world is brand new born again Baptists. They don't know any better. And we don't let them in on the secret that every good Baptist, the first time the pastor comes to visit, they get all their neighbors over to their house one way or another.
And instead of doing a baptismal class, although they are baptized now, they have a preaching point now. Special needs ministry. Dear, we want to back up and do all the other ones.
Yeah, let's go clear back to the beginning. They want to see all the pictures. Yeah, look at all the pictures you missed.
Look at all of them. There we go. Look at that.
That's chaos, man. Those are 30, 40 story buildings. There's over a thousand people that live in each one of those taller buildings there.
It's crazy. It's crazy. A million is 1000 thousand.
Okay? And take that times 23. It's. It's crazy.
And the slums are just as bad. It's just people stacked in this. You see this? That's.
That's Inga. Okay. That is where our first church is that when Bev broke her foot and we moved.
That's about 2 miles from our apartment. We got this old warehouse. Gutted it out.
Yeah. There's our church. Ta da.
And we have a little ramp to go up, just like you guys do. No, ours is aluminum. Okay.
But it's. That one's better than my aluminum one. Okay.
Okay. Fast forward. Special needs ministry.
What is special needs? It's handicapped people. I'm handicapped. So God says, use your handicap to reach out to those who are handicapped.
And we do. And God used a messenger to do that. Her name is Lyja.
She's a single Brazilian missionary lady who had a small handicapped work in her church. Water. And she had a small group, and it started growing and she was.
She had a problem. She needed someone to take care of the evangelism part. So that's what we do.
And I train guys like Marcellin here when they get saved. He's a paraplegic. I'm a quadriplegic.
He's in university right now, getting his degree and everything. He's a really sharp kid. And we have two camps a year.
One for the saved and one for the unsaved. The last one we did was in January of this year, and it was for the unsaved, and we had 75 unsaved handicap going to that camp. Go out on the Indians.
We're on Indian reservations. You say, we don't have very many Indian reservations here. Yes, Iowa has Indian reservations.
Look it up when you get home and you'll see that there are native American reservations in Iowa, and in basically every state has them. The largest one in the United States, on the mainland in the United States is the Navajo Indian reservation, which is in a little bit of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. It's huge.
Okay. When they accept Christ as their personal savior. When we first got there, we held up a Bible.
They had never seen a Bible. They didn't know. We say, well, the great creator, the man, the great.
And they know about the great creator. It's handed down. They're creationists.
It's handed down from father to child that we were created. And they don't worship the great creator. They worship demon gods, and they fear the demon gods.
And then we come and they have their demon worship centers. And you can feel the evil presence if you walk near the worship centers. It's the real thing.
And you tell them that the great creator not only made us, but that the first lady and the first man, and that we were made from the dirt earth. So they sleep on the ground. Okay? They don't like mattresses.
They don't like hammocks. They sleep on the ground. And they say, that is where we came from.
That is where we're going someday. So who told you that? Because a lot of them don't speak Portuguese or English. And they say, oh, my grandpa told me that, or my dad or my mom or someone told me that it was handed down over the years.
So they're creationists. And I take them to Genesis one. One.
In the beginning, God created the heaven. Yeah, we believe that. We believe in the great creator.
And I said, well, here's the rest of the story. Here's the piece of the puzzle. You don't have that.
He sent his son to die for you to pay the price so that you can spend eternity when you go back to the earth, when you die. And you hand them a Bible when they get saved, and you can see the value they put in a Bible because I say it's the only thing God left the great creator left here on earth to communicate with us. Is this book right here.
The roads aren't the greatest. We get stuck. We do drive a fiat.
It does have a VTEC engine, 1.8. Vtech is GM product. I'm a gear head.
Okay. I'm a mechanic, so if that's foreign to you, that's okay, too. But when we get there, it's beautiful.
It's remote, no wiFi and all. Everyone here says, I'm out. Yep, no wi Fi, not out there.
And here's a baptism of eight. I'm the guy on the edge of the water there saying the words. And I have Alberto.
One of his parents is Guaran, the other parent is Brazilian, and he's the one that we have trained, and he's doing a really good job. There's a baptism of four. We like to just go to a clearing in the jungle and hold services with the natives.
And we have a little keyboard that's battery operated. It's fantastic. And then we build chapels, too, when we get a group together.
This is one of them. They don't like pianos. They like wind instruments and guitars.
So we make sure that we leave them with music. Oh, they don't want to learn how to play piano where we are. Northridge Baptist church, Des Moines, Iowa.
No, right now. How are the works? Doing the first work, Inga? Pastor Carlos heard from him yesterday or day before yesterday? Yesterday. Yeah, we keep in touch.
We get along really good. Doing a great, great job. The tent church.
My gangbanger preacher, he's full of tattoos, man. He was saved out of life. He was going downhill fast, and he accepted Christ, went to Bible school, just graduated, and he and his wife have taken over that work, and they're doing a really good job at ten.
Church zabile, up on the mountain. My brother in law's guy with a black hat. There's another born again believer that retired and moved up there.
He's over there. I'm doing church administration with him and all of. I said, you guys don't need a pastor.
You guys do it up here. The mountain people won't understand them anyway. It's about like me or you going to Appalachian trying to pastor a church.
It's not impossible, but it's next to impossible. There isn't such thing as impossible with God. They're doing good.
Just heard from them, too. Yeah, a couple weeks ago. Last week.
Wow. Lija. Yeah, we keep in touch with her.
She's a single gal, missionary, works with the handicap. She's getting up there in years. Actually, she's younger than us, only she does.
She didn't get good genetics. She looks old and she's not. She's younger.
Than I am or Bev. And she works with a handicap. And we get along just great.
We got a group of over 150 handicapped now. Praise the Lord. Obatu.
I said, hobbito? He said, well, what do you expect out of me when you're in the states traveling around? I said, yeah, I'd rather stay here and you can go in my place. And he said, no, but what do you expect? I said, I expect you to do better without me than with me. He said, well, why? And I said, you're one of them.
I'm not. And it will always be that way. He has opened two more works, so he has six Indian reservations that he goes to.
Okay, dear. Yeah. Continued church planning.
We're church planners. The first work in Ga, we bus kids and people from other slums. And you say, oh, that's close.
It is not. The roads are terrible and you have to go slow or you'll tear your. But we have an old bus and we don't want to tear it up.
We want it to last a while. There it is. And there's a good group from palmas that circle up at the top of your screen there.
And we're prayerfully considering starting another church there. Why? Because in driving, it's like 25 minutes drive. Okay.
From that. From that one church. And there's a group that we bus in and would rather start a church there.
Okay. IPad. Awe it's out of the mass confusion of high crime, high taxes.
A lot of the factories and plants are moving out there. The Toyota plant was the first one that moved out there. And it has gone from a city of 18,000 to a city of 40,000 now.
And they need churches. We have teamed up with Ben and Danny Jacobs and a new missionary couple that have never started a church on their own. We've purchased a piece of property right there.
And yeah, there's a lot of houses there now. Here's what it's supposed to look like. Here's what the land is.
It's on a corner right there. And hopefully here in four years, we can come back with a report showing you through your prayers and a little bit of our efforts. This is what happened.
Yep. We already have a little congregation there, too, and we have already outgrown that place. And I said, let's build, man.
Let's build. Let's get a building up. So that's next on the list.
And we thank you for your prayers. Please do. Go by our table, pick up a prayer card or two.
We made them small. The QR code on the back is just our bio. Okay? It's not anything else.
It's our bio. It doesn't all fit on there. So all you have to do is click that you can read up on us and please pray for us as we go back.
You want a prayer letter or get on our list? Every two months, we send one out. We try to send pictures. We do have a blog also.
We put a lot of pictures on that, and we can keep in touch that way. Okay. Are there any questions that you have to a genuine missionary? No, we're all genuine missionaries.
We better be in our special way. Any questions? Boy, we did a good job today. Yes, ma'am.
Okay, we were heading back. Our last meeting, end of October. We're gonna go in November.
And our daughter Jeannie, who lives just down six, right here, about a mile away. Right. I.
She lives at seven. Yeah, she's expecting her child. And we've only been.
We've only seen one grandbaby born so far out of seven. Beth said we're staying. Bev's the boss.
Don't let me know. No, no, I'm looking forward to it, too. And that's.
She's due in middle of December. We're planning on leaving towards the end of December. Not looking forward to snow, although Bev likes cold weather.
Okay, any other questions? If you have questions, come and ask us. Then again, there's coffee, candy, there's lifesavers. So open the Bible to.
How much time do I have here? Oh, first Corinthians 15j:58. I'll share with you one verse and it's up on your screen there. But if you want to open your Bible, do it.
Why do we use King James? Simply because it's the one that I learned my verses in growing up and going to faith. So that's the one I still use, and I haven't changed. If others.
My brother has gone to Holman, and that's the one he uses. And a lot of the other missionaries I know use the homan bible. I've looked at it.
I like it, but I'm too old to change, I guess. This one has worked so far. This far.
Here, we can read it together. Okay, you guys ready? And if you don't have King James, it's right up there on the screen so we don't switch words. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of our lord.
Forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Okay, first Corinthians 1558. That's my favorite chapter in the Bible, and that's the last verse in that chapter.
I've preached a lot on different verses, and this is one of my favorite verses. It is not my favorite verse, but it is one of them, because it is a verse of encouragement, number one, to be steadfast. I have shared this not many a time, but I have shared this before.
Not here, but the Olympics are just finished, and a lot of things happened, mostly good, some bad, but. And we won't go there. But many, many, many years ago in Athens, they had the Olympics of sorts, and they had a race to kick off the week of sports, and it was a relay race, and they did it at dusk, at the setting of the sun.
They would light a large fire in the middle of the stadium, and it would stay lit all weekend. And then they would have relay teams, many relay teams, and the first person in the relay team who had a torch, and they would go up to that. So if you see insignias, the companies and everything, with a guy running with a lit torch and everything, that's the lumpedromia, okay? It's the name of the race, and it's the lump of the dromia.
And they would run up there, and they would light the torch, and they would do one lap inside the stadium, and then they would head out. We're doing our one lap inside the stadium, okay? We're in the United States, and then we're heading out. And then they would come to the next person and hand it off.
And hand it off and hand it off. And the last person on their team would bring the torch back. Now, the difference between the Olympics then and the Olympics now, and they didn't even call it the Olympics.
It was a game. That race had the name. There's the name of the race.
But they had prizes for any team that arrived back in the stadium with the torch lit. It doesn't matter if you came in 1st, 2nd, or third or fourth. So your job is to not outrun a guy or be faster than the other team, because as church planners, they go, well, you planted three churches, and at the same time, he only planted it.
Doesn't matter. Is his torch still lit? Yeah. And here at Northridge, well, he's led so many.
You know, he's brought so many people to church, and I only brought one. Doesn't matter what matters. Your torch is still it.
And that when you hand it off, you hand it off lit, because if it goes out, your team is out. Your team is out. So your main concern, stay in tune with God every day and keep your torch lit, because someday you're going to hand that torch off.
Are you going to hand it off unlit or lit? It's totally up to you. It's totally up to me. Steadfast.
Unmovable. Amy Carmichael. She became a single missionary gal in India, and a lot of churches shy away from single missionaries.
Well, get used to them. God likes single missionaries. There's going to be 144,000 of them in the tribulation.
Think about it. There are going to be guys, unmarried guys, okay? There's going to be 144,000 of them. There's not even 30,000 missionaries in the whole world today, okay? There used to be more.
When I was a child, there was 60,000 missionaries. There's only half that, and the population is almost doubled. Figure that one out.
We're not doing our job. But I didn't come here to say that, but I did anyway. Anyway.
Amy Carmichael, she went to India as a single missionary, and she went to visit some of the temples, and she noticed that every good Indian family who went to that, those. That one religion, they would have one child and designate them as a temple slave and just hand them over. Look up the story of Amy Carr and Michael.
She goes into children present. I will not go into detail what those kids would go through. It was terrible, and most of them didn't live very long.
She rescued children from that life and started orphanages for hundreds of children and led them to Christ. Her story is an amazing story. I encourage you to look it up and read it.
One thing I would like to share with you that she pinned down one day. God hold us fast to that which drew us first when the cross was the attraction and we wanted nothing else. Unmovable.
Unmovable. Satan is out there trying to distract me and you from the race, from watching the torch, from guarding the torch, from keeping it lit. Look here, look there.
Do this, do that. No. Unmovable.
And then the last one. Always abounding in the work of our Lord, David Livingston. He's buried in Westminster Abbey.
So if you ever go to great Britain, please visit his grave. Put a carnation. Put a flower on his grave for me.
Great man. Filthy rich family, wealthy. He was a doctor, okay? An MD, medical doctor.
Left that life to be a missionary in Africa. He got to Africa with his family and all his belongings, and he bought 38 horses to load up all his belongings to take interior, because no missionaries would go interior. They said, oh, missionaries go in.
They don't come out. We're not going in. So they were all on the coast lining up, and no one wanted to go interior, but he did.
Lost all his. All the horses died, so he'd leave his belongings behind and all he had left. His family died.
Some of his kids lived, but they went back to Europe to study and all. And he was left alone with a backpack, basically, and he stayed in Africa, read his story. It's an amazing story also, until he died and he was found dead, kneeling, as if in prayer.
And they shipped his body back. But before he died, he asked for one thing. His heart was taken out and buried in Africa.
The rest of his body was shipped back to great Britain to be buried. He's from a very wealthy family, so not everyone gets to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Okay.
And he is there. But he wrote this, I will go anywhere provided it be forward. And that's what we should say.
Is it forward? Yep. I'll go. Is it backpedaling? Ha ha.
That's not my cup of tea. Let's go forward. Life is too short, and what we do for Christ will last forever.
Heavenly Father, thank you for your word, for the words of encouragement we have seen in it today. For us, Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Thank you very much.