ja_koniga

Dear praying friends and family,

By now you should have received your winter edition of Pilgrimage Progress; if you did not, please let us know so we can change or add your mailing address. One of the things mentioned in the newsletter was a new focus on improving the road. Our goal is to start on the project in August or September (the dry months). Of course, that is contingent upon several factors for which we need to petition our great God if this is His will. 1) Easements and other legal issues as we need to re-route the existing road in a few places. 2) Neighbors who would fully support the project even as it may create some problems getting around while it is in progress. 3) A good long term plan as we consider how to re-route the entrance to our facilities. 4) Where to get the massive amounts of fill dirt required to build the road up to where it needs to be. 5) Financing this project, the cost of which is still being estimated.

We praise God for providing Melissa and me with a new computer, which ends up also (primarily, in fact) being Pilgrimage’s workhorse. Our old computer was having major problems that were making it impossible to do most of the tasks required of it. I spent six weeks trying to complete the new brochure that you saw in the newsletter, and was only able to complete it after I began using the new computer. It was a project that should have only taken a few hours. Getting financial records caught up, completing the newsletter, getting computer files off the old computer and backing them up, working on the new websites, preparing for the appreciation banquet, and other things have been keeping me in the office – not that I’m complaining as it has been nice to have inside work this cold, wet winter. It seems to be the constant battle, balancing the need to keep these critical administrative things caught up while not neglecting the equally critical and ongoing ministries of Pilgrimage and family.

Melissa stays busy keeping up with and teaching the kids, even as I spend long hours trying to finish up “just one more thing.” Today Melissa started working at our church in a ministry of preparing and e-filing taxes for low and middle income people. Actually, she has spent the last several weeks in training for this ministry that will run through April. God also uses her gift of encouragement in the lives of several women in the area.

For many years, the Lord has provided professional web designers with unbelievable technical and creative skills who have worked on and hosted our website free of charge (there is no telling what kind of donation that has been). They have not been able to work on it much the past couple of years and have now moved the site over to a system that gives us the ability to make more changes without their help. This is good as our old site had pictures of the Cary-Grove Center that were during construction. We will try (no promises) to keep this site updated with new pictures, but it is easy to forget about it. We have at least done fairly well for quite a while with keeping the prayer letters posted there. They have also registered a new domain for Pilgrimage, so we are working on a website for Pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage Learning Center’s Tuesday night classes held at the Village Bible Church in Cherokee Village, AR, are doing well. There are now ten students enrolled in the class, three of which are enrolled as full-time students, which means they will be or are taking other classes offered as part of Anchor Theological Seminary and Bible Institute’s distance learning program and are working towards one of the degrees offered by Anchor. As we do this course on how to study the Bible, we are also getting it online at the new Pilgrimage site. Our goal is to use this as a model for getting more of Anchor’s other courses available online. I am one of the full-time students, and I’m enjoying getting back into seminary course work. This is a unique opportunity for me to not only earn a degree, but also offer suggestions to get the course into a more user friendly format that will work online and help ensure the longevity of Anchor’s now thirty plus years of Bible training courses around the world.

Please continue to pray for the outreach to local teens every Friday night. We don’t mention it often, but it continues to occur and needs the hand of God upon it that it would be even more effective in reaching youth of the area for Christ. Along with that is the weekly accountability and one-on-one Bible studies with several young men.

Thanks for your prayers and support,

-Phil & Melissa Pinto