Literature | Tylers in Brazil

Category Archives: Literature

A Quick Update on The Tylers

Posted on February 18, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

There is no way for me to put everything in a prayer letter, but here are a few things that we would like for you to know about, pray for, and keep up with in our ministry…

January and February were spent on many projects…
– Relationships… God has given us the opportunity to develop stronger relationships with several people locally, help pastors and missionaries all over the country, and connect churches or individuals to others with whom they can fellowship.
– Resources… Several new messages and booklets have been added on websites.
– Translation of tracts… We received the translation of our Haitian tract and are working on layout for printing.
– Other things… Bible distribution, counseling by email through our websites, etc…
January and February – Our family has had several exciting events… Josiah (10) finished reading his Bible through for the first time, Jonathan had his 9th birthday, and Judson (6) was just baptized. See pictures HERE.
Thursday, February 20th – I will be traveling with a national missionary to scope out the tribal areas in our state. We will be going to four specific areas of the state and visiting several Indian villages as well as an Indian school.
Friday, February 28th – Josiah along with a few friends will be going to camp about two hours from here. This will be during the very popular “carnaval” holiday.
March – I will be working on finishing up a new website that will provide dozens if not hundreds of new resources for independent Baptists here in Brazil.
March – I just received 8 very good books from a publishing company to prep as e-books and place online. Lord willing it will not take but a few weeks to get all of these online.
April – Possible trip into the jungle with another missionary and a few nationals for about a week.
April – Extend our outreach to the Haitians. Print, deliver, and distribute tracts in key locations as well as develop the website side of the ministry to better reach their needs.
May – John and Julie Kokenzie may be returning to the US. If they do, we will have some more responsibilities to care for while they are gone.
June – We are working with Wings Bearing Precious Seed, missionaries, national pastors, laypeople, and visitors from the US to organize a great outreach during the world cup soccer events. We hope to have churches involved in all 12 cities. 1 million pieces of literature have been prepared for this event.(Wings Bearing Precious Seed is raising the money to get all of the literature where it needs to be. Once it is here in Brazil, it will need to be distributed to all 12 event locations. Though I am not directly involved in that part of it, I hope you will pray that the funds would come in on both ends. If you know anyone interested in helping with any part of this effort, please send me an email HERE or visit the Wings Bearing Precious Seed website.
2014 – There are many other things on our hearts and minds that we would like to press toward this year. We are seeking the mind of God in each situation. Each one of these things are directly connected with winning souls, edifying those souls, and preparing more laborers to reproduce these same steps. It is our desire to reach the world through Brazil. This requires many things, but we ask that you help us specifically by praying. If the Lord places a burden on your heart to help or get involved, there is always a need for more laborers.

–Jeremy

Posted in Literature, Ministry, Old Blog, Websites, Work With Indians

A Day in the Ministry

Posted on December 17, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

Yesterday was quite a day! My morning got started quite slowly, but I soon jumped into the work that was cut out for the day. I had a couple things on my list that had to be done before nightfall.

Monday is the day we hold our weekly Bible studies. We always look forward to the Bible study, but at the same time it does require preparation. Each week we work on developing Bible studies and preparing ourselves to teach the Bible lesson. This week we also decided to print a registration card to help us gather a little more information about those who participate in the Bible study.

John and I worked most of the morning on getting the website ready for putting our Bible studies online. We created a few pages, styled them for the lessons and uploaded some of the materials we had.

In the afternoon Amanda wanted to go run a few errands, so we ran around town looking for a few things. Though we did not find any wrapping paper, we did find mini marshmallows! (This really has nothing to do with the subject, but I thought I would throw it in anyhow.)

When we arrived back home, the registration cards needed printed, the lesson needed to be printed and reviewed also before getting ready for the Bible study. The Lord allowed everything to go smoothly until we were about ready to leave for the evening.

I had asked Amanda and the boys to come to the Bible study with me this week. As we were about ready to leave, I sent the boys outside to wait by the car. Shortly after I heard a scream! Judson had fallen down the steps leading to the car and had skinned up his knee pretty good. We brought him inside and started to doctor him up when there was a knock at the gate.

With perfect timing, the neighbors had come to invite us to a birthday party they were having which started in 15 minutes. We obviously declined, but they told us we were welcome to stop by after the Bible study if they were still outside. Needless to say, we were a bit late leaving and still had to go pick up John before going to the Bible study.

When we arrived at the Bible study, the room was buzzing. There were half a dozen or more new faces in the room and others soon arrived. We had a record evening with about 24-25 people there and several faithful people were missing. Because it is the week before Christmas, several have traveled and others were busy with practices at their churches and things like that.

God blessed in a great way in the Bible study. The lesson was on true worship. You could see on people’s faces the concern they had about their means of worship. As always, we spent a good deal of time answering questions when we were done.

We arrived back home around 10pm and noticed that the neighbors were not quite done with their party, so we decided to go say happy birthday. We planned on just saying hello and leaving, but when we arrived, then expanded the circle of chairs to include us, and the husband began chatting with me.

We have been praying for these neighbors since we moved here and have had just a few opportunities to speak to them about the Lord. The husband is a freemason and heavily involved in the lodge. Every Wednesday he takes part in their meeting and often on the weekends they have a get together at the lodge.

The Lord has put a burden on my heart for these neighbors. The opportunities to speak to them are not many because they all work and stay busy with other activities. So, this being said, the opportunity to interact was at hand.

He began to talk small talk. We talked about what we had seen in the news recently, or what he had been doing for the last few days. Then as the people began to leave, he began to open up a bit and talk about an auction he had helped for a hospital that is connected to St. Jude. This opened the door for us to speak about religion, the situation of churches today, true christianity, and a few other things along those lines.

His wife expressed interest in us having a Bible study at their house, and contrary to what anyone expected, he was not opposed to it. The Lord has given us a great opportunity to influence our neighbors for the Lord!

So, how did it all end? Well, at about midnight, we walked back across the street being the last ones to leave the party. We have been invited over for dinner later in the week, and a great door of opportunity is opening before us! Please help us pray for these neighbors. The wife and daughters attend a church, but do not necessarily show evidence of true salvation. We would love to see them trust the Lord as their Savior and watch the Lord do a wonderful work in their home and lives.

The work of the Lord is full of surprises! We are called on in many different circumstances to go out of our way and take the light of the Gospel to many different people. I was tired at 10pm when we came back from the Bible study, but after our visit, I hardly slept a wink thinking about what God was doing in our neighbor’s lives.

We serve a wonderful Lord and Savior who is alive today and working all around us. May we open our eyes and see what God is doing.

“This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.” Psalm 118:23

— Jeremy

Posted in Bible Studies, Literature, Ministry, Old Blog, Websites

Another Project Complete

Posted on October 11, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

Through the years, we have worked on many different projects. The Lord has given us a burden to reach our generation. One of the tools we have to reach our generation is the internet. This has become such a vital part of our ministry and efforts because so many people are spending time online.

We live in a very remote part of Brazil, but that has not stopped technology. In our city of over 37,000 people, over 15% of the population uses Facebook. The numbers of internet users are much greater than this.

Though our work is not perfect, it seems to have somewhat of a professional look and it is useable. We work with the resources we find at relatively no costs other than time invested. Sometimes this causes some issues, but the Lord keeps us pressing forward through the difficult spots.

This week we finished a new website for the one of the only Independent Baptist publishing companies in Brazil. We have partnered with them by moving them forward in the technology realm. We realize the importance of Christian literature and have invested in this project knowing that it will pay off in the future.

Good books are hard to find in Brazil. Therefore, we created an online store for this publishing company, Editora Maranata to help them get the word out and become accessible to the modern world. Click on the picture below to visit the new website and also online store.

Over the last two years, the Lord has slowly expanded the influence of this publishing company. We now are sending the monthly paper out to almost three times as many people and that number is growing at a steady pace.

Please continue to pray for the future of this ministry. We hope the web store will enable and expand the sale of books on a national level so that the publishing company will be more self-supporting and less dependent on churches in the US. There is a group of pastors and missionaries working together to not only keep this ministry alive, but to move it forward. There are three new books being prepared for publishing, and several others asking us to publish their materials.

Good literature is essential to soul-winning, training disciples, and equipping leaders. False doctrine is spreading very quickly across Brazil and we must continue to battle the false doctrine and defend the faith which we so dearly cling to. This ministry is one means by which we are seeking to do this. Please keep praying.

— Jeremy

Posted in Literature, Ministry, Old Blog, Websites

Recent Trip to Campo Belo

Posted on January 31, 2012 by admin Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, John and I took a trip up to Campo Belo, Minas Gerais. There we met with the three pastors in the last photo below, Jim King, Cleber Rodarte Neves, and Anderson Dantas. The trip was not stressful at all for us being most of the time we were sitting in our hotel room working and doing research on the projects we were talking about. However, I do believe the trip was of great benefit to all of us. Not only did it help us build a stronger relationship with some national pastors, but it also proved fruitful to the ministry of Editora Maranata.

We arrived on Tuesday and left Thursday giving us a few days to talk and work together. On Tuesday we met with these pastors and talked for a while about the future of the ministry. The Lord blessed in the conversation. We pointed out some basic needs the ministry had in order to survive and then began acting upon those things.

On Wednesday, we began by visiting a couple banks to inquire about any regulations they might have regarding online businesses and money transfers. We quickly found out that nobody had ever dealt with this before and they had absolutely no idea how things worked.

In the afternoon we drove over to Pastor Anderson’s city of Boticão. He showed us his church, future home, and some of the beautiful scenery around that city. The trip became a little more eventful when he took us around in his little VW Bug. Though we were aware of the fact that the car was not in perfect condition, we were quite surprised by the large piece of the floorboard began scraping and soon fell of. I could easily feel the road by just allowing my feet to rest on the floor mat.

Later in the afternoon we drove back to Campo Belo in the pouring down rain. As you can see in the pictures below, we were slowed down by traffic. Several of the bridges around the area were closed and we were forced to take the only road open. This road is the one you see in the pictures. When a car would muster up the courage to go through the muddy trenches, the crowd that had gathered around the area would cheer. As the car would go through it would slide around and throw mud and water up in the air making it quite an entertaining scene.

We made it back in town in time to get part of the midweek service at Pastor Cleber’s church. It was refreshing and enjoyable to spend a little time in a church that seemed to be enjoying the Christian life.

Below you will find pictures from all these different events on our trip. To view the entire album, please click visit THIS PAGE.

–Jeremy

Posted in Literature, Ministry, Old Blog

Cambodian Ministry

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin Leave a comment

The Lord has opened a great door for us to reach Cambodians all over the world. We are excited about this. It will be a little work, but this may help reach people who will never hear the Gospel any other way. Please pray that this ministry would help those serving in Cambodia, those with Cambodian ministries in the US and other parts of the world, and that it would help us get the Gospel to Cambodians who have never heard the Gospel.

Cambodian Flag

Cambodian Flag

Posted in Literature, Ministry, Old Blog, Websites

A New Publication – Herança Cristã

Posted on April 25, 2011 by admin Leave a comment

After many months of work, the Lord has allowed us to get out the very first edition of our new publication, Herança Cristã. If you would like to see a sample of the first issue, just click the image below. We are still learning how to best display this publication.

The Lord has given us a beginning group of about 90 pastors and missionaries that are receiving this. We hope that it will spread and soon we will be influencing many many more people. Please pray that God would allow this to be a great encouragement to these pastors, but that their people would also sign up to get it.

The publication is not designed for pastors, though they would benefit much from it. Our goal is to get good Christian literature into every home in Brazil. God has burdened our hearts to do everything we can to help Christian people get good literature. Though there are many resources here in Brazil, those resources are choked out by the mass of literature produced by the mainstream groups. We want to help get the best materials out and into the hands of people who are seeking the Lord.

— Jeremy

Posted in Literature, Ministry, Old Blog, Websites

Tracts in Hand!!!

Posted on March 6, 2011 by admin Leave a comment

Back in December we decided to print some tracts. We began praying that the Lord would supply the necessary funds. We also prayed about where to have the tracts printed. While John started working on the design work, I pressed toward finding a printer.

A friend of ours was planning on coming to Brazil soon and offered to bring in some tracts when he came. After checking into several places we quickly decided that it would be very expensive to have him bring them in from the US. We then turned to looking for printers here in Brazil.

A printer here in Brazil is not an easy thing to find. We looked for weeks at finding printers and getting prices. After comparing them to US prices, we found it possible to print them at just one or two cents more than if we printed them in the US. So we made our first attempt.

We found dozens of printers and went to talk to them. 90% of them either did not work with this kind of printing or they were shut down. So I kept searching online and wrote e-mails out to every company I thought would do the job we wanted. One particular sales representative responded and wanted our business. They sent us a good quote and we went after it.Now it is about the beginning of January and we are buckling down to get this job done. I sent them the files and they said they would look them over and give me a response. The response I received was, “These files will not work. Your black is not the right color. We cannot print them the way they have been designed. Please contact your design artist and tell them that the black color needs to be 100% Black and 40% Cyan.” What on earth does that mean? I started searching out what we could do to change the color. We tried everything we could. For days I went back and forth with them to try and solve the problem.

I downloaded a 30 day trial period for two recommended software programs, Photoshop and InDesign, to try and work out the problem. I knew that we were now dealing with professional printers and not quick digital printing jobs. These programs dealt with CMYK inks and not RGB which is the typical format used in photo manipulation programs.

I had a very limited understanding of what was going on. So I asked many questions. When I thought I had figured out the problem, I sent the file in again and again. The files were returned every time. We even set up a day to go to the printer for them to solve the problem for us. However, they were unable to solve the problem and would not listen to our advice in the matter. We wanted a specific design and they wanted to print something different. In my book, that means we are not going to come to a conclusion.

The next step was to look for another printer. We had already spent weeks on this project and I felt like I was at the end of my wits. Prayer was the only thing that kept me going. Actually, I told my wife I had quit several times, but something pressed me on. We had already asked advice from people in this business for over 10 years and they did not understand the issues. So prayer was our only solution.

After finding a new printer, we sent them the files. The expected answer was given. Your black is not the right color. I did a little more research to find out why things were not matching. I had solved the problem on our end, but when it reached the printer it was different. Once again I told my wife that I had no options left. I suggested we send in the same file again, however we just pray that the Lord would work out the issue!

This time we received a favorable response. The files were accepted! Within three working days I was sent a proof to authorize for printing!!! Hallelujah! Our God sure is a wonderful God. All of this went through on one of the last days of the trial period for Photoshop.

The problem seems to have been in the way one was opening the file. I was able to open the file in the correct way, but the printers were not opening it in that manner. Of course, they don’t want you to tell them how to do things, so God had to work that out on their part.

We received 20,000 tracts from the printer last week! We will keep about 5,000 of these. The remainder will go to people who wanted to purchase some of them from us to use in their churches or ministries.

Many of you prayed for us while this was going on. Thank you very much for your prayers.

–Jeremy

Posted in Literature, Ministry, Old Blog

Update on Recent Events

Posted on February 18, 2011 by admin Leave a comment

It has been a good while since I updated the blog with any real news. So, here is what has been happening lately on the Tyler side of the ministry…

Gospel Tracts – In December we saw the opportunity to print a few tracts to use. We have just about been out of tracts for the last five months or so. Because of this we wanted to print some very nice looking, attractive tracts that we could give out with the Gospel website name on them. We did not realize it would be so hard to print them. Yet, the Lord has still kept our hopes up. Printing here in Brazil is a bit different than the US with less technology. Though, the system they use is pretty modern, the programming used is different. The printers have also asked us to meet certain qualifications with colors that we have never had to do before. Because of this, I have spent days trying to fix things for the printers. We are still waiting, but are praying they will get printed this week.
Music Lessons – I am now giving lessons to about 10 young people and children. This is an opportunity to help churches here in Brazil develop their music programs. It has been exciting to see them improve. Yet, we know our time here in São Paulo is short, so we must do what we can to move these students along quickly.
Lightning Strikes – This is not normal in the US, but here it has become quite a trying circumstance. It has rained almost every day in the past two months. About 4-5 in the afternoon, the clouds roll in and we get not only rain, but lots of thunder and lighting. In the middle of January, we heard a very large crash on a Sunday evening. We had not unplugged everything that evening. So, we got struck by lightning. No, not personally, but our internet and everything connected to it got hit. So we are still working on getting everything back to normal. After weeks without internet (at home) and much time trying to figure out how to set everything up again, we are back online. We are praying we will be able to get things back to normal in the next few weeks to keep up with our correspondence as we should.
Future Plans – Please pray with us about what this year holds for us. We would like to move to Porto Velho by the end of the year. Though nothing is set in stone, we are beginning to plan toward this goal. We are also praying about taking a short trip to the US to visit a few churches and see family and friends. Our goal is to take this trip so that we do not need to worry about returning to the US for several years after our move.
Publication – We are designing and planning an online bi-monthly publication. The idea behind this publication is to promote good doctrine, unity, a high view of God, holiness, salvation and many other such things that are lacking in this country today. In the beginning of this year, we started sending out a monthly publication created by a fellow missionary, Jim King. This has been rewarding and a new source of encouragement for many people and pastors in our Baptist churches here in Brazil.

–Jeremy

Posted in Family, Literature, Ministry, Old Blog