Dear Christ Covenant Family and Friends,
It is hard to believe that another year is quickly coming to a close and that we have now been in Honduras for almost 3 years! We are continually grateful for the opportunity to serve our Lord here in Honduras and pray that He is magnified in us and through us as we serve. Every time we write to update about our work, we are overwhelmed by the group of people we have supporting through prayer and giving, and for that we can not thank you enough! We bless our God for His provision of people who have continued to help us serve Him here in Honduras and pray that this update about what the Lord is doing will be an encouragement to you! I also want to apologize in advance for the length of this update!
    Over the past few months, though we haven't sung it in a long time, I have found myself often whistling and singing the hymn “Blest Be the Tie that Binds”. The first three stanzas are the ones that have been of great encouragement to my soul as I have thought about our church plant. The author John Fawcett writes:

  Blest be the tie that binds
  our hearts in Christian love;
  the fellowship of kindred minds
  is like to that above.
  Before our Father's throne
  we pour our ardent prayers;
  our fears, our hopes, our aims are one,
  our comforts and our cares.
  We share our mutual woes,
  our mutual burdens bear,
  and often for each other flows
  the sympathizing tear.

It is with great joy that much of this song rings true about our young church plant! We have now been meeting(as of this Lord’s Day) for seven months and it is amazing that, in such a short time, our church has become like family. Our church family has been a constant blessing to us. I will share more details about what has been going, but I can’t express enough what an encouragement it has been to me to see a group of people love the Word, love each other, and desire to grow both in depth and number. We truly have been blessed to be a part of a community of people that are bound by more than blood!

Church Plant

As far as the details of the church plant go, we have been blessed to see our church grow from a small group to now filling almost all of the seats we have. Josue and I had the great privilege of preaching through the book of Ephesians together and then I was able to preach though the book of Ruth this past month. We will be looking at the book of Galatians starting the new year and we are very grateful that folks have been encouraged by the preaching of the Word. We would ask you to keep praying that we would be faithful in the exposition and application of the Word to the glory of our God.
    We have also been meeting Sunday evenings for a study on the Westminster Confession of Faith. We are now in chapter 7 and we are moving along slowly because we want to be able to discuss some of the finer points. We do hope that this will be something that would turn into evening worship in the future. We also continue to gather on every Wednesday night for a season of prayer, as we greatly desire to be a church plant that prays together often.
    Finally, we have had a couple of great get togethers over the past month to celebrate the Reformation and Thanksgiving(the link below has pictures). Both of these were a good time of fellowship together as we continue to desire to share time together as a church family. We look forward to a church Christmas party which we will have in a couple weeks. Pray that it would be another time of sweet fellowship and encouragement as we eat, sing hymns, and read the Word together.

Family

The past few months have been a time of transition and change for our family. Ford and Catherine began school (Pre-Kinder and 3 yr old Nursery) this past August and we are so thankful for their mornings spent there. They are learning Spanish at an incredibly fast rate and both of them are learning so much academically as well. We look forward to their upcoming Christmas program! The triplets are growing and are on the move! It has been fun to watch the three of them learn new words and things every day. Ryley and Whitley are running all over the place these days trying to keep up with their older siblings. We are thankful to give a good report on Anne Waverly. She has greatly improved in her muscle tone and usage of her legs and stomach muscles. She is crawling all over the place, pulling herself up, crawling up stairs, and just this week started standing up without any help from us or furniture to pull up on! We are hopeful that she will be walking soon! Thank you for your prayers for her, and please continue to do so!
    We had the greatest privilege and blessing of having Rebecca stay with us for a total of about 8 months to help Rachel with the kids. Her service was not only to our family but to the church plant as a whole as she enabled Aaron to do more pastoral visiting and studying away from the house. We are eternally thankful for her help and support. She went back home a few weeks ago and our family has now transitioned back to it just being the 7 of us. We are thankful for the Lord’s continued strength and grace as we strive to take care of our five children and minister here in Honduras.   

Financial need

I want to continue to thank all of you who so graciously and freely given to our work here in Honduras.  We continue to be blessed with the ability to church plant here by your kind gifts. We currently have two pressing needs for our church plant. We are in need of one time gifts that will help us pay our monthly rent for our church meeting place and church offices. This location has been a great help to our work here and has given us a place to have all our meetings on a weekly basis. The second thing is a need for more chairs. We were greatly blessed someone donate money for us to buy 40 chairs, but we are now in need of more. We are right on the edge of being standing room only and we would love to be able to have more chairs available as we continue to grow.
    I want to say thank you in advance for praying that these needs would be met and for considering giving to these needs. If you would like to give to either of these needs you can click here. Please send me an email in order that we can earmark the funds for these needs. Also, remember that all of your gifts are tax deductible.

Political unrest

We do want to tell you that this past few weeks has been an interesting time politically in Honduras. The vote happened a week and a half ago and there has still been no winner declared. It has led to protests in the streets, rioting, and looting. We would ask you to please pray for this process and for continued peace. Things have greatly calmed, but as we get closer to a final announcement tensions could rise. Please continue to pray for Honduras in a very uncertain time. If you would like to know more about what is going please feel free to email us with any questions.

Mission Conference Season

We made the decision to do a short HMA(home missions assignment) at the beginning of next year because there are some churches we haven't seen in quite a while who have invited us to attend their missions conferences and it will save us money to do it now instead of later. It will save us money because our triplets fly practically free until they turn 2 years old. The difference in buying 4 tickets and 7 tickets is a pretty large sum and we are trying to be wise with our travel back to visit churches. That being said, we will be at 5 different Missions Conferences and visiting a few other churches. We would love to be able to see some of you as we will be in and around the southeast.    
Christmas cards
    One of the things our family loves to get is Christmas cards. If you happen to have sent us a Christmas card in the last 2 years, it is still either on the fridge or somewhere where our kids can look through them. It really is one of the things we enjoy about the Christmas season. If you would like to send one our way we would love to have something on our fridge or our wall so we can continue to pray for you through the year!
You can send it to:
Aaron and Rachel Halbert
Apartado 853 Zona Toncontin
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
We continue to bless the Lord for your prayers and financial support! We pray the Lord would grant you much joy in Him during this holiday season!

If you happen to want to see pictures of the past few months you can click here!              
 
Prayer Requests:
 Peace in a very uncertain political situation
 The financial needs of the church to be met
 Faithfulness in preaching and teaching the Scriptures
 Continued growth in depth and number for the church.
                       
Praises:
 The blessing it was to have Rebecca help us with the kids for the last 8 months
 A wonderful core group at our church
 The blessing of having teammates to serve alongside.

Gracia y paz,
Aaron, Rachel, Ford, Catherine,
Ryley, Anne Waverly, & Whitley