Prayer Requests:
-- Spiritual and numerical growth at Hope
-- Spiritual growth and protection for the following members of our church family:
Jessica, Alissandra, Barbara, Julho, Meire, Rodolfo, Paulinho, Felipe, Ariel
-- Preparations for our coming furlough
-- Ann and Jackson's July 9 wedding
-- Our efforts to raise our needed support during the coming year.




Description of Ministry:
We are church planting missionaries sent by First Baptist Church of Lake Orion, Michigan and serving with Baptist Mid-Missions in Cleveland Ohio. We arrived in Brazil in January of 1997 and spent our first year in language acquisition. During our first term we were privileged to be part of the planting of Calvary Baptist Church (Igreja Batista Calvário). Calvary is currently running around one hundred in attendance and is under the direction of a national pastor.

Our second term began in August of 2001 with the purchase of property for the building of Hope Baptist church (Igreja Batista Esperança). We have spent the last four years in the physical and spiritual construction of that work. We are currently running around 80 in attendance and already have a national on the team who will become the pastor. Calvary and Hope are two of only three fundamental Baptist churches in this city of over half a million.

Our philosophy of ministry is to allow God to use us in both the physical and spiritual construction of the church. In that process we purchase a piece of property in a prime location of the city that has no fundamental Baptist work, and begin to build the physical plant of the church. As we work on the building we begin to see God working in the neighborhood and surrounding areas through our evangelistic efforts such as VBS, Youth ministry, King's Kids, Special Meetings, as well as the normal Sunday School, Church services, and Wednesday evening Prayer Meetings.

The "construction" aspect of our ministry has allowed several stateside churches to send missions teams to help with our buildings. We have actually seen God call four couples to ministry here in Brazil as a direct result of their participation in our ministry.

Our ultimate goal is the transfer of the planted church into the hands of a national pastor and his flock of believers. To date the Lord has allowed our team to plant four churches here in Sorocaba. Our goal is to see Him work in at least two more church plants in this city of over 500,000.




Family Info:
My name is Mike Jewell and I am originally from Lake Orion Michigan where I, and my wife Dawn, and our three daughters, Amy, Ann, and Abby attended First Baptist Church. Pastor George Stiekes was my pastor for eighteen years and it was under his ministry that we felt the call to missions.

I was raised in the Christian home of Clyde and Venna Jewell who began attending FBC in the late 1950s. My parents placed a great emphasis on faithful church attendance. I accepted Christ as my savior at seven after a junior church lesson at FBC. It was my mother that led me to Christ. During my teen and early-married life both Dawn and I were involved in various ministries, including: Sunday school (classes of children, teens and adults), AWANA (leaders and directors), youth sponsors, deacon, missions committee, trustee, as well as several missions trips.

At twenty-eight I was called to ministry during a challenge by one of our FBC missionaries. I had graduated from high school in 1971 and this challenge came in May of 1980. Because of the time period between my graduation and my call I struggled with the idea of Bible College for a number of years. However, God opened the door for me to begin my training in the fall of 1984. From 1984 until 1987 I attended William Tyndale College, in Farmington Hills, Michigan, part time. In the fall of that year Dawn and I decided that it would be best for me to take a leave of absence from my job at GM Truck and Bus and attend college full time. Three years later in the spring of 1990 I graduated with a bachelors of religious education degree in pastoral studies.

During my college experience we met Shawn and Donna Alexander, a missionary couple that was headed to Brazil to become part of a church planting team in Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil. We began to communicate with them and were invited to visit them in Brazil. We took that survey trip in July of 1994. It was during that trip that we realized that God was directing us to the city of Sorocaba. We arrived on the field in January of 1997 after two and a half years of deputation.