It is mid-summer here in north Georgia, and our family can feel it: the air is heavy, the bugs are noisy, and the mountain creek is beckoning our children to enjoy a moment skipping rocks and chasing fish. It is, in other words, a happy time, one punctuated as well by our ongoing purpose here of raising financial support for our missionary call to provide theological education for students coming from around the world. Below, I’ll give a little update on our progress toward meeting our ministry budget for a missionary location in the Netherlands, but first let me tell you a bit about how we are all doing.
Let’s start with the kids. The boys wrapped up their school a few weeks back – and now we are pushing ahead with summer school, in between trips to the tire swing and lego box. They’re both working hard to earn an ice cream cone at Dairy Queen by reading 24 books on their level: not a small feat, given the near constant distractions of the season. Our eldest has recently discovered a passion for science, and one of my favorite afternoons was spent making an electric generator with him from a kit he had been gifted. His brother is an avid builder with blocks and action figures, and we marvel at the way he meticulously breaks down problems and works out solutions. The two of them have recently discovered card and board games; Battleship and Go Fish are frequent favorites, but their preferred competition is Chess, and they are both getting impressively skilled at it. Their sister continues to be a powerful force of personality in our home and now that she is four has likewise begun more structured time learning her numbers and letters. She enjoys playing with her brothers, but she also has a strong independent streak that allows her to carve out a very girly identity tailored to her own passions (above all, right now, princesses and mermaids). God has blessed us with these children, and he has been very gracious in keeping them safe, healthy, and happy over the last few months!
Mary Beth and I are doing well too. Just as we were recovering from our trip north for Wycliffe College’s annual Convocation (and my graduation), we hopped on a plane to Tulsa to help represent global Anglican missions at the Provincial Council of the Anglican Church in North America. It was a great privilege and blessing to welcome people when they came to the SAMS-USA information table to learn more about going as missionaries and supporting those who do. Mary Beth shared her testimony at a break-out workshop on mobilizing young people in cross-cultural missions, and the next day I addressed the Council and shared a vision of the Great Commission that (I hope) will mobilize Anglican congregations and leaders to mission: not just locally but also globally. We arrived back in Georgia a bit under the weather, but we are finally recovered, and we begin making missionary visits again to churches this coming weekend.
In fact, raising missionary support is never very far from our minds these days. Though progress continues to be slower than we would hope, we can see that progress. As of today, we have 72% of our budget in pledges from people and churches in Canada and the United States, and we are regularly reaching out to potential partners and sharing our vision for a global church that enjoys full access to affordable theological education.
We have had to admit to ourselves that this vision for ministry has, in some ways, been harder to communicate to churches than was our prior vision for pastoral ministry in South and Central America. We have hardly spent any time yet in the Netherlands, let alone at Tyndale Theological Seminary where I will be teaching students from across the developing world, and the range of our pictures, videos, and testimonies can be, for these reasons, a tad limited when compared to the decades I spent ministering all around the New World. What’s more, being an educational and theological resource to the global church can seem somewhat removed from the more immediate needs of communities in impoverished regions of the world – needs to which many North American believers often feel an immediate pull.
I’ll be honest: we can even feel that pull ourselves, and every so often Mary Beth and I sit down and check in with each other, to see if we still think this is where the Lord wants us to devote years, and likely decades of our lives?
But we have found that each time we ask these questions, the Lord steps in to answer our doubts and renew our sense of his calling. This past month, we were so blessed to meet in person with another missionary couple, Peter Hays and his wife Margré, who have served with Tyndale for years as part of their broader strategy of ministering to the global church and giving witness to Jesus in this corner of western Europe. It was incredibly encouraging to talk with them over lunch, in large part because their confidence and enthusiasm for this ministry of theological education was palpable and contagious. They know these students, they have walked with them through their course of studies, and they have seen the impact that this community of scholarship is having – not only around the world, but also in the Netherlands. What we have largely intuited from brief encounters, they have experienced first hand themselves. And while they, like we, do not know what the Lord has in store for our futures, we came away from our time together refreshed by the sense that the Lord will use this ministry in Europe to bear kingdom fruit that will cross the boundaries of language, culture, nationality, and denomination.
We continue to seek churches, families, and individuals who are open to this vision of global mission and who might want to partner with us as we follow God’s leading into theological education for the worldwide church. What is more, we are praying that the Lord will move the hearts of these partners to pledge their financial support to our ministry soon – if possible, by the end of the summer or early fall.
The reason for this, as Mary Beth shared in her update last month, is that there is a course that Tyndale is hoping I can teach in Winter 2027, but to begin making plans for that term our family needs to be reasonably certain we can arrive in the Netherlands by the end of autumn. There is always an element of faith when it comes to making these determinations, but we are also convinced that the Lord has called us to prudence and wisdom as well. Based on our discussions, to commit to teaching this January, we will need to be very close to meeting our budget by August 31.
This makes the next two months – and your support – crucial for our moving ahead with ministry in the Netherlands. We ask you prayerfully to consider the following steps:
Please pray that the Lord would give us clarity and wisdom about when we should be moving to the Netherlands by providing the funding needed to undertake our ministry there soon.
Please pray about giving to our ongoing ministry, and if the answer is yes, begin giving now – and by writing to us to let us know.
Please pray about representing our ministry’s vision and our family’s needs to others who may align with that vision and have a heart for those needs.
Please pray for our children, as they continue with play and learning, and for us as their parents as we try and prepare them for the changes coming.
Please pray for me as I preach and teach, write and revise, all the while our family continues sojourning in this in-between stage of life.
And let me end by thanking all of you for coming with us on this journey. We are grateful for your notes and encouragement, for your gifts, and above all for your prayers – whether known to us or not. We could not undertake any of this without you, and we are so grateful. We’ll give you an update again soon, but until then may the Lord richly bless you in this month to come!