MISSIONARY PROFILE
Clint
& Rhonda
Rardin
Missionary Update 10/12/2021
Dear Praying Friends, God blessed the Naucalpan mission's three-night evangelistic services celebrating its second anniversary with several visitors; an attendance of 95, 82, and 112, respectively; and seven souls professing their faith in Christ, including a couple of young ladies and a young man who have been coming on the routes the last several months. Last Wednesday, one of the new men of the Carranza mission, Tomas, brought out two young men with problems with alcohol. Also a young man, Ivan, passing by and hearing the singing, came in. He is the son of a pastor. Also, Moises, a father of two young teenage girls, who has a burden to raise his family, came. Brother Alan had invited him last month and he came with the invitation in his hand. I visited him on Saturday, and he and his wife, Sarai, and his two girls came to church on Sunday.as well as Alejandro and an older woman, Irma, who also are faithfully attending the mission there. In spite of our bus routes being a little down (88) as well as the kid's classes, we had a great attendance on Sunday with 225 as we had 170 adults and our "drive-in" crowd was up to 137. That is close to the attendance we had during the 9-week surge in attendance right before Covid struck last year. The auditorium was packed again with about 30 extra folding chairs put up to accommodate the crowd. The adult attendance is only about 10-15 less than it was in those heydays before Covid. Those 10-15 can be accounted for by a couple of solid families that have not returned since Covid (one of those two families moved to another city), five doctors who haven't returned since Covid, and a Haitian diplomat, Darlene, who hasn't returned since then with her three daughters, We hope this growth trend keeps up. What helps is that Mexico City is now at yellow light and at the point of going to green light with no restrictions, probably next week as the number of new Covid cases has gone down drastically. What will also help is when we begin our four-week fall evangelistic campaign on the 24th and ending with our 17th anniversary on the 14th of november. Please pray for these coming weeks, many souls will be saved. Please pray also for our opening of a street mission in the infamous Tepito neighborhood, next Wednesday, October 20th, as we use the RU program there to reach the addicted in that community. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin ReplyForward
Missionary Update 09/07/2021
Dear Praying Friends, Thank you for praying for the opening of the new mission. We have so far given out 7500 invitations door-to-door. Many of the John/Romans distributed are from Fairhaven's Bible Builders. We are in the rainy season where it rains almost every day. Great time to open a mission, right? The first day late afternoon we got rained on pretty good. I have been praying since then that God would hold back the rain while we went door to door. It has rained while we we drive to our location and rained after getting back in the car, but not once since Monday while out and about! God is so good! God keeps on bringing out people to RU. This Friday a young man named Victor came out from one of the routes and was saved in RU. The next day, today, he came and helped clean the church. I had a great time using the discipleship material we have with Enrique, who just was promoted last week from first sergeant to a comisión as a lieutenant in the army. Enrique gave a solid testimony of his salvation. He was saved a few months ago when I was away and Oscar, our assistant pastor, was preaching. Enrique showed a hunger for the word of God. I also had a great time discipling recently-saved Sergio and his wife, Jasmin. Now Sergio has a burden to see his thirteen year old daughter, Sofia, saved. The Mexico City goverment decided to return to yellow light, easing restrictions even more as new and active cases have gone down after having risen because of the delta variant. This helps us as more people are less afraid to go to church. We just had a couple of ladies (sisters) who were saved right before coronavirus come back after several months of absence. Please pray for the revival services this coming Thursday night to Sunday morning and the evangelistic services at the new mission Sunday night to the following Tuesday night and the inauguration that Wednesday night. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin
Missionary Update 07/01/2021
Dear Praying Friends, After being gone for two Sundays: one preaching out and another on a trip to Texas to work on a one-year visa and see my mom; I rejoiced to see a church full as it was the third Sunday of combined services, something we hadn't seen in over a year. It was great to see the auditorium full with a couple dozen extra chairs set up to accommodate the people. It was great to see the hallways full of kids going to their respective classes again and to greet them as they went by. I wrote about a young woman named Laura who came to RU on Friday. She returned on Sunday with her husband and little son, raised her hand for salvation, was dealt with, and was saved. She and her husband, Lenin, returned in the evening service. Please pray for his salvation. I plan to visit them this week. They want to continue to attend. Viridiana, of whom I have been writing, lives quite away from the church and comes in an Uber every time she comes, which is five times a week (Fridays for RU and Saturday for soulwinning.) She now has found a place to rent near the church and is saving her money for the first rent and deposit. She wants to be closer to the church because she wants to put her six year old, daughter, April, in our Christian school and also wants to help on the bus route where she will be living. Also the young lady Karina, whom I have mentioned, now lives in the area of the bus route and wants to work on it as well. Natalia, a neighbor of ours who was reached a couple of years ago, also wants to put her six year old girl, Dana, in our Christian school. She brought her unsaved husband, Arturo, to RU last Friday. I have a meeting with both of them after church tonight for an unknown reason. Please pray for his salvation. We met our quota I was praying for of 40 teens for camp. Please pray for their hearts as they go to camp in three weeks that they make life-changing decisions. We may have an opportunity to enter into state-sponsored children's homes here in Mexico City to mentor and counsel the children there. Many come from homes of neglect and abuse and, consequently, have a lot of emotional problems. Marisol, a member of our church, is in charge of all the homes and mentioned to me that religious groups enter there to work with the kids. I never thought of that avenue of outreach, but God has laid it on my heart to do something. Thankfully, we have maturing Christians in our church that are looking for opportunities to serve. Here is another chance for them to use their gifts God has given them. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin
Missionary Update 06/28/2021
Dear Praying Friends, This summer, we took 34 of our teens to caverns about two hours away. They are about as big as Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico. They have an area in the cavern where they have symphonic orquestra concerts with theater seats. We were allowed to have our preaching there and Oscar, our youth pastor, preached to the teens inside the cavern. By faith, we reserved space for 40 teens at an excellent Christian camp we take our teens to. We have 36 signed up now. We are praying for four more. I finished six months of teaching lessons on how to win souls in our Thursday night Bible study. Starting next Thursday I will teach on the family. During the summer, a lot of my teaching and preaching is on the family. We had three new students this Friday in our RU program as a woman in our church came and brought her unsaved husband and a neighbor. Last week Viridiana brought to RU a Haitian woman, Ruth, who she works with in her new job. Karina, who was practically imprisoned in the apartment of Chinese diplomats during the Covid crisis as their kid's tutor and nanny, has joined our band of soulwinners the last two Saturdays. We have about a dozen going out every Saturday besides those that visit on the four routes. This week thousands of John/Romans in Spanish were shipped from Lighthouse Baptist Press Ministry in South Dakota to a church in San Antonio where we will pick them up in August. They will complement the thousands we have here already so that on late August to early September we can put at least 15,000 invitations to the Evangelistic services and inauguration of the mission near the airport that we plan to hold between the 12 to the 15th of September. Please pray for the success of this outreach as well for the Revival services we plan to have the 9-12 of September in our church. Our church is praying for revival in general in our individual lives, our families, our church, and even our city. We are still looking at several venues for our evangelistic services. We have about five options right. I hope to have something nailed down in the next couple of weeks. Please pray for wisdom that it be exactly the place God wants for us. In August we are bringing up Elias to Bible college and plan to pick up alot of RU material for our new RU street mission we plan to open in late October. Please pray for this new ministry as well. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin
Missionary Update 06/14/2021
Dear Praying Friends, Last Saturday, I had the privilege of going soulwinning with yet another RU student for the first time. Mario and I had a good time and he was enthusiastic about getting tracts into people's hands and talking to people on the street. Mario's mother, Sara, has been coming to our church for years and has been instrumental in seeing two of her grown sons coming to our church as well as her grandsons and her brother and sister. Carlos, one of her sons who attends faithfully and completed the RU program to know how to reach addicts, has offered to use one of his storage spaces in front of his business as a place for us to have a street mission using the RU program. His business and home is in Tepito, what is infamously is known as the "Hell's Kitchen" of Mexico City. Please pray for this new ministry we plan to begin on October 20. This is apart from the mission we plan to plant on September 12-15 with evangelistic services near the airport. Right now I am looking at three different venues for these services. The purpose is that it one day be an Independent church and a place where the people reached by the street mission can go to grow as it will be closer than our church. Thank you for praying for the local elections. The conservative party made a clean sweep of our delegation (it is like a borough in New York City). Mauricio Tabe won as mayor of the delegation 55 percent to 40 percent. America Rangel, who stood up for those who would help homosexuals convert back to normalcy, won big as our district's representative in the city legislature; and Magarita Zavala, the nation's ex-first lady, became our district's representative in the Mexican Congress. Felipe Calderon, her husband, said in a video before the election that the election would make the difference between the nation being a democracy or a dictatorship as President Obrador wanted a supermajority in the Congress to reform the Constitution to allow himself to be continually re-elected. Thankfully, he lost many seats in the Congress. In Mexico, the current radical leftist party in power also lost 10 out of the city's 16 delegations--all on the west side of the city. There was a meme in Mexico's social media of a map of Mexico City -- all blue on the west side representing the right wing coalition and all red the leftist east side and on the bottom it read: Looks like Berlin (referring to the Cold War's Berlin). This weekend I was knocking doors in a village along a mountainside near a town in the state of Hidalgo of a Mexican missionary we support where I preached this weekend. A woman named Hilipedia listened intently to the gospel and God opened her heart to trust Christ as her Savior. Please pray that the missionary's church follows up on her that she may grow in the Lord. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin
Missionary Update 06/07/2021
,Dear Praying Friends, God has been blessing our RU addictions recovery program. with three new students and two new students, respectively, the last two weeks with over 40 attending both weeks. A couple of our students, Genero and Viridiana, are now both baptized and members of our church and now are going soulwinning with us on Saturdays. Viridiana, who was saved from occultism and alcohol, is now singing God's praises in the church choir. This Thursday is our Christian school's graduation ceremony. We have several kids going into Jr. high next year and, as things stand now, we will have only three kindergarteners and three in the elementary school next fall. Most of the students will be jr. high and high schoolers. Mary Carmen and Elias are graduating from high school. Mary Carmen, a daughter of a Christian army officer but not of our church, is one of our best students, both in comportment and academics. She and her sister came up though our Christian school from the elementary grades. Many parents have been reluctant over the years to put their kids in our school because we refuse to incorporate our school in the system of the Secretary of Education. Because of this, parents have been afraid that our school doesn't count and their kids won't get into a good university. Our school uses a Christian curriculum in Spanish comparable to Bob Jones and the high school graduates receive a diploma with an apostille from an academy in the US that is accepted with validation in Mexico. Mary Carmen will be attending the University of the Valley of Mexico, which is ranked the 4th best private university in the nation. Elias, our youngest son, is the most diligent student of all our children and will be attending Fairhaven Baptist College in the fall. I had written that I was encouraged to have in attendance last Sunday almost 250, like we had before Covid when we had a growth spurt in the beginning of last year. This Sunday, we had 272, by far the highest non-special Sunday attendance in the history of our church. I really can't account for it, but that it is God's blessings for our church's faithfulness these last fifteen months. We only had four adult visitors this Sunday, but had almost 200 adults in attendance and had 121 on the buses, 20 more than our average pre-Covid attendances. One visitor came from across the city and came to our church because her church is still shut down since March of last year. According to the authorities, next Monday we will be in green phase. All restrictions on churches should be taken off. Please pray for that. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin
Missionary Update 05/06/2021
Dear Praying Friends, Thank you for your prayers for the evangelistic campaign This Sunday, we had 273 in attendance as several families who hadn't attended since Covid returned and many visitors invited by our people came. Four adults made decisions for salvation including Laidy, a grown daughter brought by one of our men; Brenda and Eduardo, the sister of one of our women and the father of the sister's children; as well as Olga, a teenager who has attended from one of our bus routes since she was in the kids' class. We had 123 on the buses, about 20 more than our average bus attendance before Covid. We also still have about 11 people among our core membership that haven't returned since the Covid outbreak, but we hope will return in the next weeks. Although the city government still has us in the orange phase, they are expecting to enter into yellow next week which officially allows for 60% of capacity in the auditorium, something we have been basically doing the last few weeks as we maintain two different morning services. Once we hit the official yellow phase, I will encourage all our people to return to church, albeit with two different services until we enter the green phase and normalcy hopefully by the end of summer. Please pray for our plans to open a second mission near the airport in September. We plan to have special evangelistic meetings (after a couple of weeks of canvassing) on September 12-14 and the inauguration of the mission on the 15th. Please pray for souls saved and that Christians in the area looking for a place to fellowship and and for spiritual growth will attend. Our goal, of course, is that it develop into a church in next few years. It will be a good place for our preacher boys in the Bible Institute to practice preaching, songleading, and soulwinning, as well. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin
Missionary Update 03/18/2021
Dear Praying Friends, This week, we had a very good Sunday. We were just three shy of 200 in attendance, something we hadn't had since the beginning of December. Of course, that is when we were running our routes. We haven't run the routes this year since we went back to phase red, although some are coming on their own. Our drive-in a year ago was about 150 before Covid, so to have almost 200 without the routes makes me wonder what it'll be like when we run them again. It's just good to see people who haven't been her a while coming back. Twenty-one states in Mexico have gone to phase yellow and Mexico City was contemplating that this past week. If we did that, we could have 70% capacity and would run the buses: two the first hour and two the second. Phase green will mean things are back to normal and then we will back to having all the routes and everyone there at the same time. I cant wait for that day! number of tracts, after the service there were only about three or four tracts left in the tract rack. I can't seem to keep it stocked the last few weeks. Saturday soulwinning is up and the routes are still getting New Testaments out in their respective neighborhoods. I believe God is going to honor our faithfulness in a great way when all this Covid business is behind us. Thank you for your prayers, Clint Rardin