“Build a church! Provide a spiritual home for hundreds of former idol worshippers in India! Meet them at last on the Sea of Glass! Our Northwest Adventist Brass Choir audience could fund this!” Last November Tom Tavasci, minister of music at the Sunnyside Church in Portland, Ore., had his sleep interrupted by these thoughts.
Tavasci had just come from joining members of the Sunnyside Church board as they approved retired pastor Tom Stafford and his wife Brooke’s request for support for evangelistic meetings and a new chapel building near Kurnool, India.
Tavasci planned and prayed about his vision as he prepared to direct the Northwest Adventist Brass Choir in concert. Then on the night of the concert he asked the audience to consider how they could fund the construction of a chapel with the offering that evening. It would cost no more, he noted, than the parking fees for the whole group to attend the symphony in downtown Portland.
Now, four months later, a band of excited, newly-baptized Seventh-day Adventists in the village of Konidela, India, are watching the final touches being put on their “Northwest Adventist Brass Choir” chapel. They are meeting every Sabbath and dreaming of how they can expand the one room building!
The “Northwest Adventist Brass Choir” church and their sister churches, filled with more than 650 new members, will be cared for during the next three years by Gospel Outreach workers Easter Babu and Joseph P. These workers had been visiting and holding meetings tirelessly since the first of December.
Tavasci and all who have joined in this effort to pray and to give, have reason to praise the Lord as He has indeed expanded their borders and prospered the cause of Christ. •
Tom Tavasci was impressed to help send a Sunnyside group to India for evangelism and church building by using the offering from the Northwest Adventist Brass Choir’s concert.
Ground is broken in Konidela, India, for the Northwest Adventist Brass Choir chapel.
More than 650 members have been added to the church as a result of the evangelistic meetings held by Sunnyside volunteers and the preparatory work done in the area by Global Mission Pioneers.
