Greetings, friends.

As is so often the case, I must apologize for the long interval without news from Mozambique. It is not that God has ceased working in our corner here, but only that it takes so long for me to organize and report on what is taking place, and time has been in short supply.

I'm sorry for not writing sooner.

With things slowing down a bit, I hope now to prepare several newsletters to update our supporters on what has happened in the past eight months.

I'll be sending several reports.

And please note that during this time, I have been faithful to send simple brief reports 2-3 times per month via WhatsApp to a group I established for family, friends, and supporting churches. If you would like to join the group, please click here. You will need to have WhatsApp installed on your phone.

You can join our WhatsApp group for more frequent updates.

The newsletters I am preparing now include information already sent to the WhatsApp group, though I am adding additional details in these reports.

These newsletters will have more detail on the same content.

Major Events

Specifically, the major events to be addressed from the past eight months, plus one historic event planned for the near future, include:

Here are 11 major events.

1. The July 2025 Fiel ("Faithful") Conference attended by 544 church leaders and wives from eight of Mozambique’s ten provinces

July 2025: 
Fiel Conference

Paul Washer preached nine messages on the gospel, and other speakers covered Romans 9-11.

Paul Washer preached.

2. The August 2025 Fiel Seminars for 41 church leaders

August 2025: 
Fiel Seminars

That is the subject of this report.

Details are below.

3. The September 2025 20th anniversary Sola 5 Conference in Johannesburg

September 2025:
Sola 5 Conference

Sola 5 is a fellowship of 46 Reformed Evangelical churches scattered across all of southern Africa. I am a founding participant of the association and serve on the Sola 5 Steering Committee as the representative from Mozambique. 

The 20th anniversary Sola 5 conference held in Johannesburg

at Antioch Bible Church, pastored by Tim Cantrell

from The Master's Seminary

I serve in this association of Reformed churches.

4. The October-December 2025 work Grace Missions performed for HeartCry Missionary Society.

Oct-Dec 2025:
HeartCry work

We are delighted that HeartCry has begun supporting Mozambican pastors. This is the fruit of Paul Washer’s visit in July as the main speaker for the Fiel Conference. Besides the projects already executed in recent months by Grace Missions on behalf of HeartCry, we and our local church will serve as the hub responsible for monitoring and encouraging Mozambican pastors (called "indigenous missionaries”) receiving HeartCry assistance.

Paul Washer at the 2025 Fiel Conference in Nampula

HeartCry has undertaken support for Mozambican pastors administered through us

5. The November 2025 visit from son-in-law Jaime Rodriguez and daughter Gracie

Weary travelers after 48 hours in airports and on planes!

November 2025:
Gracie's return to Mozambique

The best part was the two grandchildren in tow!

6. The November 2025 emergency procedure in the local Nampula hospital operating rooom

November 2025:
urgent surgery

This was necessary to drain a “giant abscess” deep in my right thigh that developed in only a few days and with no known cause. The timing was bad as I had to depart the following day for a flight to the U.S. requiring 26.5 hours in tight economy seats with a swollen, traumatized, infected lower extremity, thus maximizing nearly all the major risk factors for developing a venous thromboembolism! However, by definition, neither abscesses nor emergency procedures can be planned for a convenient moment! 

My plane tickets were non-refundable, so we had to work fast and take short cuts, including no anesthesia since the lone anesthetist on duty was going to be occupied for hours with another case!

Sometimes a little knowledge can be a bad thing. So, like many a physician might feel who has seen a patient die suddenly from a thromboembolism, with all the risk factors in favor of a bad outcome on the long flight, I was pleasantly surprised when I walked off the plane in Memphis still alive! (Julie loves to recount many similar stories to embarrass me.)

A sudden unexplained giant abscess deep in my thigh was drained the day before my 27-hour journey to the USA.

7. The December-January 2026 U.S. trip to visit our children and grandchildren and two sending churches  

Dec '25 - Jan '26:
Visit to the USA

To defer retirement from the field for as long as possible, Julie and I hope to begin spending two to three months each year in the U.S. keeping up with our growing family which includes four new grandchildren born in just over eleven months during 2024-5. We also will use this time to visit supporting churches back home.

Our five children and their better halves (left to right):

Jeremy and Sarah Crute, Katelyn and Benaiah, Kent and Anna, Gracie and Jaime Rodriguez, Jennifer and Andrew

A highlight of our time was joining the entire family

in their annual holiday gathering, a first for us!

Can you count the babies?

There are five (but only 4.2 are visible).

We are so thankful for how the whole family loves the Lord!

And how they love each other,

including all the wonderful in-laws grafted into the clan!

We hope to repeat yearly visits to children, grandchildren, and supporters there.

8. The December 2025 four-day cruise along the California-Mexico coast 

December 2025:
Four day cruise...

This was a nice get-away for Julie and me, courtesy of kind friends in our home church.  

The ship while docked in Mexico.

It can accommodate 4000 passengers and 1200 crew members!

I was truly excited about riding the high speed toboggan tube slides up top, but alas, they were shut down for repairs!

The third story of the main dining room

The main hall in the center of the ship


I suppose John Bunyan would call it vanity fair on steroids,

but we had a good time, and without sinning (I hope)!

...a gift from friends.

9. The January 2026 purchase of a retirement home in South Africa.  

January 2026:
Home purchase

Julie and I decided to buy an apartment on the shore of the Indian Ocean at a place South African friends have freely made available to us for over 30 years. As a family we enjoyed vacationing there every year. More recently it has become a hideout where I can accomplish my annual ex patria projects in support of the Mission without all the interruptions experienced in Nampula.  

We bought a seaside apartment in South Africa.

The reason for this purchase is, once again, to prolong our ministry in Mozambique by having an alternative closer than the U.S. if health concerns should one day force us to spend long periods outside our host country. From South Africa we can have ready access to Nampula to continue the work here via regular short trips. For the present, while we are not using the apartment, it can be rented to vacationers.

The other consideration was that we can no longer afford to live in the U.S. if retirement becomes a necessity, but Americans can live well in South Africa while spending little. Security, utilities, taxes, and maintenance inside and outside the apartments for the entire ocean front property costs a mere $230 per month.

Morning view from the east verandah

Evening sunset looking toward the west

The grounds with a pool large enough for short laps

Our private beach - wasted on Julie and me, unfortunately

If our health forces us out of Mozambique, we can live close enough to visit

regularly.



Plus living costs are so affordable.

10. The January 2026 meeting with a WorldVenture medical missionary and emergency room physician

January 2026:
Visit from doctor

We are thankful for this American colleague who plans to move to Nampula in February 2027. His parents were Presbyterian mission- aries to Mozambique, and he grew up in this land prior to receiving his university and medical training in the U.S. Most of his medical career has taken place in Mozambique and a famous, sophisticated mission hospital in Kenya, so besides speaking Portuguese, he is familiar with the many elements peculiar to African and Mozambican medicine.  

He was a former missionary kid in Mozambique who returned to serve here himself after American medical training.

He and Grace Missions want to join forces for three years in our hospital while he launches both his and our hospital-based ministries intended to help people in the north.  We have been interacting for years about this, but if his decision to move his family to Nampula in 2027 holds, we may finally be able to take concrete steps toward opening at least the clinic wing of our facility.

A year from now, we hope he can open at least our hospital's outpatient clinic.

A follow-up meeting to include the local health department is planned for March.

And please pray for a surgeon so we can open the hospital too!

We'll soon meet with the Health Department.

And pray for a surgeon, too!

11. The April 2026 meeting of Reformed Mozambican congregations from all parts of the country 

April 2026:
Church meeting

At the meeting we will discuss creating an association of like-minded churches for mutual encouragement and the advance of the gospel of grace in Mozambique. 

Pastors want to create a Re-formed church association.

In this newsletter, I begin the cycle of reports to come by focusing on the post-conference seminar which I addressed as follows in one of the brief WhatsApp reports:

I reported on WhatsApp...

14 August 2025

...in August.

Last week’s seminar had a fine, enjoyable class of 22 capable students, the most I can handle because each student produces 6 papers to mark every day, which comes to 142 papers graded each day for five days! The first week I had 19 students, and they were much harder to teach and grade because several had illegible writing or disorganized thoughts on paper that were hard to interpret.  

One of the two post-conference seminars

for 38 church leaders and three women

I taught theology to 19 students the first week and 22 the second.

However, in both classes it was gratifying to hear repeatedly that individuals felt the written materials and lectures were transforming their understanding of the gospel. I was amazed in some instances because I could not tell this was happening from grading their papers, but I recognize that some older people in this aural African culture still cannot communicate well in writing. The weakest student in the second week’s class was surprisingly the most effusive in insisting that her outlook was undergoing radical changes.  

Though some papers didn't reflect it, they said the seminar transformed their perception of the gospel.

Together with her husband she serves as “pastora” in a miracle-based name-it-and-claim-it charismatic church and was hearing the doctrines of salvation by grace through faith for the first time, both in the seminar and at the conference where Paul Washer preached nine messages on the gospel while two other speakers continued on through Romans 9-11 (after covering chapters 1-8 in the previous two conferences). If this woman understood what was being taught by her teachers during the two weeks she spent with us, she had every reason to be overwhelmingly grateful!

A female pastor of a charismatic church was the lowest scorer but testified that her whole outlook changed.

The irony in her case is that she was not supposed to be in the course at all! She scored well below the cut-off on the Scripture knowledge exam required before being accepted into the course. Her pastor husband did make the grade and was supposed to be accepted, but a clerical mistake resulted in him being removed from the roster instead of his wife!  

She had failed the entrance exam and was only in the class due to a clerical error.

Neither his wife nor I had any idea she had failed the entrance exam when she confided to me that she had prayed and prayed that the Lord would let her take the course. I was so incredulous that she had scored well enough on the Bible knowledge test that I looked up her grade myself. When I found the mistake made by our usually meticulous assistants, I told her the Lord had indeed taken special pains to answer her prayer! I also promised her husband that he was guaranteed a place next year without repeating the entrance exam!

We do pray all year long about these annual seminars, that God would send only those people in whom He is at work. We would love to think that this woman was an answer to our prayers as much as her participation was an answer to her own prayers!

Pray that this young woman, so excited about a gospel she had not heard before, would continue to grow in the truth!

That was God's answer to her fervent prayers for acceptance!



And we hope an answer to our prayers for God to send only His own!

Here are further details just for this newsletter:

Additional info:

The lowest score in the first week’s class was made by a pastor who came from a district far in the bush. He has been influenced by a fellow pastor, Herculano Baptista, who had taken this course as a youth the first time I offered it 20 years ago, in 2005. I remember him vividly because of how he reveled in what he was learning! In his eagerness he sat always at my immediate left in our circular classroom. That man is now a mature church leader, a constant fixture at every Fiel Conference, a vigorous promoter of our ministries, and a great encouragement to me.  

My first seminar in 2005, 405 students ago.

Herculano, the young man in the green shirt, back to us,

is the pastor who has been such a blessing to many.

The lowest scorer in the other class was a pastor from deep in the bush.

The irony is: I could not discern from what this recent student wrote on his papers that he was getting anything from the course, yet he expressed his gratitude in the most exaggerated terms I have heard so far.  He said my coming to Mozambique was the greatest blessing God has granted the church in this country (as if he could know this from his isolated outpost in the bush), because I brought the true gospel to Mozambique (that part is correct, at least for himself and those close to him).  

He praised God for sending me so he could hear the true gospel - along with "the whole rest of Mozambique" also in need of it.

I relate that story to let all the seminary-trained, polished pastors preaching to rich, sophisticated congregations in wealthy boroughs of modern U.S. cities consider what a greater blessing it is to bring the same truth to poor rural pastors and “pastoras” who have never had an opportunity to hear the gospel presented accurately. They may not be grasping it as well as college-educated people back home can, but what they do hear about the great God who reaches out to helpless and hopeless sinners in their pit of sin, drawing them to Himself by His own mighty arm and according to His own will and special love for His elect children, bursting apart the blinding shackles Satan has placed upon their darkened minds – that is music to their ears and breathes life into their hearts and makes some of them get up and dance for joy.  

What a joy to present the truth of salvation by grace thru faith to poorly taught, rural Africans who have never heard it, but who receive it gladly when it finally reaches them!

I am convinced that nothing has this effect more than the gospel the Reformers rediscovered and passed on to us, in some cases risking their lives in the process. What a blessing it is to spend ten hours a day for five and a half days teaching soteriology to men from varied and generally darkened backgrounds, while in the process re-visiting over 200 scripture texts dedicated to this glorious theme!

I'm thankful the Reformers risked their lives to rediscover it and pass it on to us.

Re: other men in the classes, two more who made relatively low scores insisted in their enthusiasm that their ministries would be transformed like their own hearts had been by the truth they learned in the seminar. I hope so, but I always feel better when test answers reflect what people say is taking place on the inside. To be sure, some of the students are not experienced test takers, and that may explain part of the gap between their grades and their conviction that they are undergoing radical shifts in their understanding of grace and salvation. But I know that such a shift should indeed be taking place considering the gulf between what I get to teach them and what they hear in the churches most are coming from.

Other students also exclaimed about their transformed perspective despite their low grades.

On the strong side of the scoring results, these days I have many college level students coming from sound churches with excellent teachers who themselves have only recently come to understand the gospel of grace thanks to the growing movement spreading across the length and breadth of this country.

Many students, some already under sound teaching, did score well.

In the second class, for example, 54% of the students scored higher than 90% in the course. Of the two classes together, 71% finished with scores of 80% or above, thus earning a certificate verifying their satisfactory result, and five finished with distinction, scoring over 98% on the fifteen tests. One of those five was an influential leader in the Assembly of God churches who devours our literature but does not preach what he has learned because he wants to maintain his position in his denomination. Yet he circulates our books and is bringing other influential leaders to the course.  

Over 70% of the students scored 80% or better.

There are many students from Pentecostal, charismatic and health-and-prosperity churches competing for one of the 40 slots available each year in the two seminars. Another prominent Assembly of God leader who took the course years ago sends many of his pastors to the seminar each year, despite knowing that the doctrine is contrary to what their churches teach. This is both frustrating to me and gratifying – gratifying because many of these men do comprehend the material and seem to go away convinced – yet frustrating because they are told to disregard some of the information and file the rest of it away purely for their own knowledge. For these people, it is on-the-shelf doctrine the elite should have, but not the rank and file. My opinion, and that of so many of my students at the end of the course, is that if one can keep the gospel of grace to himself, he clearly still does not understand it! I pray the day will come when some of these men will be unable to hold back any longer!

I'm frustrated with those who supposedly appreciate the teaching but hide it from their parishioners because it contradicts their denominational dogma.

This is the change that should take place, and it has already occurred for several present-day leaders in Mozambique's Reformation movement. One man actively leading the movement in the capital of Tete province has been coming to our conferences for nearly 20 years. He is a lawyer, a retired schoolteacher, and was an Assembly of God pastor until he began to preach the gospel of grace, at which time he was removed from the Assemblies. He carried right on preaching even though he lost his church building and almost his entire congregation, including his wife. She remained married to him, but each Sunday she went off to one of the sanctioned Assemblies for worship and fellowship. She could not comprehend why, in the face of all they were losing, her husband was standing his ground over something she could not even understand.  

Some risk all to preach the true gospel, including a veteran of our conferences whose wife stayed at the church that rejected him.

God was gracious, and out of the ashes He raised up a congregation committed to the word. Most happily, God eventually brought the same understanding to the pastor’s wife who now faithfully supports her husband’s work.

Pastor J.A.P. who came on board quickly

with the Fiel ministries and paid the price

Thankfully, she came around, and they now serve a new church.

The leader of another hub in the adjacent Niassa province is a former Assemblies pastor who was marginalized by his associates when he embraced the Biblical gospel. But he soldiered on alone because his heart left him no other choice, and now he is influencing many. Three of our current church members, two of whom are church leaders, were brought to the truth and to maturity under his fruitful ministry before they moved to Nampula.  

Another gospel influencer led three of our current church members to faith.

And here in Nampula Province, Grace Missions’ own administrator overseeing the 25 reading groups meeting throughout the country was formerly in charge of training all the Sunday School teachers in the city-wide Assemblies of God churches. Then he discovered the Reformation literature Editora Fiel had supplied his local pastor at no cost, and after reading all those books began teaching and upholding the truths which he now saw clearly in the Scriptures. 

The result was that he was soon removed from his responsibilities in a public “de-frocking” ceremony at the joint Sunday worship service of all the local congregations. As he stood before the assembled churches, they were warned to steer clear of his heresy and no longer heed his teachings. Nearly everyone who formerly liked and respected him now drew back from him. By God’s grace, he learned about our Fiel Conference, which he previously thought existed only in Brazil. He was overjoyed to discover that there was such a conference for Mozambique, and it was taking place every year right in his own hometown! At the conference he found a much-needed sphere of like-minded friends. From there he soon began participating in our own congregation, bringing with him ten to twelve disciples who were similarly committed to the new (old!) doctrines he had been teaching. And this group from across town eventually led to the first of two daughter churches arising from our congregation.

The administrator who leads our reading groups was defrocked by his denomination and rejected by his friends.

The reading groups ministry in which this brother serves will be a major focus in the cluster of emails to follow, some of which I have already composed.

Final Remarks

Soon I'll report on his current work.

The last time I reported on the reading groups in May 2025, I said there were 25 groups made up of 267 readers reading one new book each month and then meeting to debate what they read. After that report went out, I was chagrined to discover that some of the information supplied to me represented only names on paper. I was amazed to discover that even after many months in existence, some of the groups had not yet received books, and other groups that had books still had not begun to meet. I resolved to correct the misinformation in my very next newsletter, which only now is being written.

My last reading group update was prepared from inaccurate information.

It turns out that the errors were on our staff’s part, and in the past months those have all been corrected. Today all 25 groups receive books for all readers for each month, and all the groups are reading and meeting, although some have yet to hit their stride in completing one new book each month.  

Our staff has corrected the errors; all 25 groups are now meeting.

And the number of readers keeps growing. Presently we have 25 groups meeting all across the nation, comprised of 331 readers, but there are an additional nine groups of 110 people waiting to enter the program once our current book order has arrived. At that point, we will be servicing reading groups in every one of Mozambique's ten provinces.

One of our rural reading groups. The leader,

seated in the right foreground, is Pr. Herculano Baptista

from the first post-conference seminar pictured earlier.

Next month they will be discussing Steven Lawson's biography of Jonathan Edwards featuring his 70 resolutions.

They have 331 readers, with 110 more on a waiting list.

Later, I will report on our bookstore ministry and the satellite distribution centers we have opened in locations far from us. The men overseeing the satellite book centers and the leaders of the 25 reading groups are generally men who have graduated from the post-conference seminars, have been gripped by the truths they have learned, and are keen to see the same light spread to the surrounding churches in their regions. These workers receive no compensation apart from the joy they have in helping those who benefit from their ministries.

Future newsletters will feature our literature distribution program.

Additionally, I will report on the first assembly of Reformed Evangelical church leaders in Mozambique slated to occur on 10 April. I believe this will be a historic meeting. It will be held at a hub church for Reformed Evangelical congregations situated in the central part of the country and will be attended by church leaders from all over the nation. The purpose is to discuss the formation of an official Reformed church movement such as I have been promoting for more than a decade. Though this is a grass-roots call sent out by the Mozambican pastors themselves, all the leaders I know of thus far are men who participate in our nation-wide ministries, and to a considerable extent they are the fruit of those churches at home who so generously support our work.

Reformed Evangelical church leaders in Mozambique will gather on April 10 for what I believe will be a historic meeting to start a Reformed church association.

More on those developments will come every few weeks in the newsletters to follow until I have updated our supporters on all these ministries.  

Watch for news every few weeks.

And please do not forget to click here if you want to receive brief updates several times a month via WhatsApp.

You can join our WhatsApp group.

By His grace,

Charles and Julie Woodrow