Why We’re Coming to the US

It’s completely dark at 5:00 p.m. now.  Winter is coming; the skies were really gray today, a harbinger of the dreary season ahead.  We miss our family, our church, our home. 

But that’s not why we’re coming to the US later this week.  We’re coming to attend the MTW Global Missions Conference (GMC) in Greenville, South Carolina.  We’re hoping to find some young ladies who would be willing to serve as interns next summer and work with the teens in our church (see this link for more information).  We would also like to find some new team members to come work with us for the long haul. 

The GMC is a great place to meet folks who are interested in missions.  So, we want to meet with you and encourage that interest, no matter where you may end up serving.  The GMC is also a dangerous place for folks who are interested in missions.  It could start a fire in your heart that you might not be able to put out.  God used the GMC in our lives in 2007 to begin moving us toward a call to the mission field.

We plan to have a booth in the exhibition area of the conference.  Please drop by and say hello.  In God’s providence it may be that we’re coming back just to talk to you. 

Things That Last

One of the side benefits of traveling to visit our fellow missionaries in Europe has been the opportunity to do a little sightseeing.  The Pont du Gard was built sometime in the first century A.D. as part of an aqueduct that brought water to the Roman colony of Nemausus (present day Nimes, France).  This impressive structure is still standing after two millennia, a testimony to the Roman engineers and construction workers who built it. 

The protestant evangelical church in Europe is still standing, too.  Despite hundreds of years of persecution and the twin scourges of Nazism and Communism, the tiny evangelical church remains.  It is tempting to bewail her present weak condition and find fault with her for failing to win the continent back to Christ.  I’d rather praise God for her faithfulness.  She has weathered the storms and endured the trials.  In many countries here she has been an outcast for centuries, always in the minority, always marginalized, but continuing to hold fast. 

As the church in America struggles with the hostility of her culture, the loss of her freedoms, and the marginalization of her ideas, perhaps we could learn a thing or two from our European brothers whose faith, by God’s mercy, has lasted.