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March/April 2024
Dear Praying Friends,
Early in March, the members of Grace & Glory Baptist Church unanimously and joyously promoted Bro. Adewale Adesina to be their senior pastor. Since the middle of 2015, I’ve been co-pastoring two churches simultaneously, so it is a big change; I do continue to work with Pastor Adewale in the college, preach regularly at GGBC, and wear gladly the honor of “founder” of a strong and growing work in Nigeria’s capital city. In our first church plant, Truth Baptist Church, great growth has endured over the last 11 months. We are averaging over 350 on Sunday mornings, unprecedented in the church’s 18-year history. On the second Sunday morning of March, TBC members invited the parents of children from our 24 weekly Bible Clubs, resulting in a record-setting attendance of 778 (over 100 visitors)!
Truth Baptist’s Soul-Winning & Leadership Conference (SWLC) was held on the first 4 days of April. We were thankful to once again host Pastor Ken Shinn from Columbia, Mississippi. Bro. Curtis Hall of BEST Missions brought Bro. James Abbey with him; Tim Currington, the director of Prison Alliance International (PAI), also made his first visit to Nigeria for the meeting. By successfully combining the conference with a training session of prison ministry workers from around the country, our 15th Annual SWLC recorded 54 churches represented, the highest number ever! PAI has helped us expand a 5-year-old prison ministry here to over 40 correctional facilities in 16 states. The next week, Bro. Hall and Bro. Abbey joined me in Cross River State for a great SWLC at Independent Baptist Church of Calabar.
June 1 will be 19 years since Sabrina and I first came to West Africa, and the Lord has graciously allowed us to host more than 90 American visitors, several on multiple occasions. However, Nigeria’s procedure for a 2-year (sometimes less) multiple reentry visa is one of the most difficult in its application process, hindering more people from scheduling trips to see our ministry. Conversely, in April, 4 of our guests took advantage of a new visa-on-arrival; all I needed from them was their flight itinerary, passport data page, address, signature, and a photo for a 30-day visa that costs $260. Additionally, we just hosted 3 preachers from Rock of Ages Ministries, and they received from the Consulate of Atlanta (others have received from New York City and Washington, D.C.) multiple reentry visas for 5 years! I’m writing all of this to encourage more of our supporters to prayerfully consider taking a missions journey to Nigeria.
Believing God,
Mark Holmes,

In four out of the last five years we have been privileged to conduct six Pastors’ Conferences in the three main regions of Nigeria. The last two conferences of 2023 were completed successfully at the beginning of November in the cities of Port Harcourt and Ibadan with the help of two great host churches and our guest missionary evangelists Jim Belisle with FBMI and Denton Bell with International World Wide Evangelism. Every once in a while the Lord allows us to have visitors just for our family and to remind us of all the sensations we first experienced when we came to Nigeria nearly 19 years ago. Such was the case hosting the Fitzpatrick family in the middle of November. Kyle was one of my members in a young-adult Sunday school class that Sabrina and I started at our sending church before we began deputation; he and his wife Emily are friends with whom we do not fail to get together during every furlough and their son Silas became fast friends with our Noah on this trip. We had a wonderful time fellowshipping together and introducing them to fellow missionaries two churches seminary students children’s Bible classes and clubs and our academy. Just after Thanksgiving I was able to make a brief trip to the U.S. to help my brother move my mother into an assisted-living apartment in Gulfport. This was something that had been “in the works” for several months but was hastened by a fall that Mom took at the beginning of November. We’re thankful that she was not wounded that she has a great long-term care policy and that we’ve already seen improvements from a few previous injuries through a physical therapy program that is much more convenient from her new apartment. I returned a couple of weeks before Christmas in time to take part in the cantatas at both of our churches share in two staff fellowship meals conduct the Christmas Day service at Truth Baptist have a New Year’s Day barbecue with Grace & Glory Baptist and enjoy a multi-day hotel stay for a family vacation. For nearly two years the co-pastor at Grace & Glory Baptist and faculty at our seminary Adewale Adesina has been partnering with Robert Smith former missionary in Nigeria serving in Barbados to raise funds for every independent Baptist church in Nigeria to receive a three-year illustrated Sunday school curriculum that we are printing “in house” through Pastor Adewale’s Great Company Multimedia. Miraculously at $180 per set 97 churches have joyously received the teaching material. There are at least 20 more churches who are represented annually in our Pastors’ Conferences and Youth Camps that we would like to assist with your help and support.

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