A Brief Description of Shreveport, Louisiana
Shreveport Spanish Company Organized in 2011
In January 2008, a Spanish group began meeting in a Sabbath school room of the Shreveport First church. In January 2009, Pastor Dionisio Alcantara, a retired pastor from the Puerto Rico conference, began leading out in the small group. The first thing he did was to organize the group into a team where members had responsibilities and held church offices. They also added a mid-week prayer service. Attendance began to grow and activities brought them together. Once a month on the third Sabbath, members spread throughout the Shreveport/Bossier area, passing out tracts and magazines, or enrolling people in Bible studies. As they grew, the English church offered them a larger room and fifty new, padded chairs were bought for their comfort. The group got a projector and a piano (Downs, 2009). The Spanish group was organized as the Shreveport Spanish company on April 2, 2011. By 2013 the Spanish company had grown and was looking for a church building. To help with this plan, on June 1, 2003, the Shreveport First church gave a $20,000 check to the head elder, Carlos Portanova, matching the first $20,000 the Spanish company had raised (Farmer, 2013).
Shreveport Spanish Church Organized
In March 2014, it was approved for the Shreveport Spanish company to use the former Adventist Book Center building as their worship center and assume the cost of the utilities (Minutes, 2014). On October 18, 2014, the Shreveport Spanish company was organized as the Shreveport Spanish church (Simpson, 2014).
Citations
(2014, Mar. 6). Executive Committee Minutes. Shreveport, LA: Arkansas-Louisiana Conference of SDA.
Downs, Sylvia. (2009, Jul. 1). Southwestern Union Record, p. 22.
Farmer, David. (2013, Aug. 1). Ibid., p. 18.
Simpson, Chris. (2014, Oct. 20). Shreveport Spanish SDA Church. Retrieved from eadventist.net.
How it all Began 