Personal News, Summer '06

Dear Friends,

Greetings from sweaty Spain! With temperatures (now being mid-July) reaching the mid-30s we are happy that our flat is better prepared for the heat than the cold... and certainly well located. As you know, the missionary life is a hard one, not least when you live just 5 minutes from a beautiful beach... and yet somehow have that feeling you really ought to be sweating in front of the computer!

Celebrating a round figure

Local activities

So what are we really up to? Church-wise we have commitments to one church for the remainder of the year, joining them on a summer-long campaign on the Palma sea front, doing Open Airs in front of the Cathedral. I preached last Sunday to about 180, most of whom were church members, but they reckoned there were about 15 to 20 others who listened right through, not to mention the passers by who got literature. I am also speaking from time to time in the church prayer meetings. The church has about 300 members, half of them from Latin America.

The other important job I am trying to do with the church is help them to set up their web site. This has involved getting a test site set up, which will eventually be transferred to their domain. Then we had two training sessions to teach the leaders of about 6 departments to edit their own sections of the site, with further training to come and orientation for the webmaster for the future. The first stage, to be launched hopefully after the summer, will be purely information for members and potential visitors. A second and more challenging plan is for an evangelistic site.

Another thing that happened to us on arrival was to learn that the local English speaking community, who are visited for a Communion service by the Anglican chaplain in Palma once a month, were starting a weekly English speaking Bible study for Lent. This was sufficiently successful that they decided to continue it indefinitely. Several times it has been held in our flat. It's fascinating to meet with people from a wide variety of spiritual backgrounds. The leader is Linda, lay reader and former head of a C of E primary; Barbara, the area coordinator and very Anglican – been here at least 30 years; one who is Anglican but attends the Catholic church on Sundays and has been here since the '60; another who is German, but lived in England over 30 years and here about 11, originally Catholic, then interested in Buddhism, but had a conversion experience; one who won't touch a service but is on a spiritual journey – preferably New Age; another Catholic, whose ideas are even more New Age...

And one of the lads from (the Spanish) church has just got a new girlfriend who lives in our area, is from Essex and just made a decision for the Lord. She translates at a surgery in Cala D'Or. We may get to give her lifts (if her boyfriend can desist from the 130 km round trip!), but we only met on Sunday.

Webs and other entanglements

Besides 'local' ministry, work continues on Pray4Spain and our other web sites. After almost 6 months of irregular activity, due to preparations for the move and delays in getting broadband, there has been a lot to catch up with over the past month and more will need to be done before the summer comes to an end, not to mention the daily news updates. Likewise, we try to post prayer updates and requests arriving from OAC outreaches across the globe, particularly the ReachTheCity campaigns. The Spanish language Evangelists' Conference site has not has as many updates as should have been posted due to a changeover in prayer leadership, which has not gone smoothly. I suspect there will be no more prayer letters from the organisation this year, by which time all impetus will have been lost. In the mean time, I attempt to get prayer information as best I can so that outreach dates can be posted on the site.

Looking to the future, there remains much to do with the web sites, but as from August we will also be starting to visit the other churches in Palma... there are hardly any outside the city which is also where most of Mallorca's population live. Whether getting to know new churches will lead to a move or to new local ministry opportunities remains to be seen. But the latter is desirable and the former not impossible. If we change churches it may be at the end of the year. As to local opportunities, it seems from the perspective of where we are now that there is virtually no relationship between the churches here, no ministers' fraternal and certainly no official body representing them. Thus it is hard to know if we even know of all that is going on on the island. And then there is the Peninsula, Europe and many other 'burdens'!

Pray for us as we work out what the Lord has in store.

Lots of love from us both,

Chris & Hilde