It’s been a pretty slow week actually. We spent most of the weekend painting my office, had a few friends over for dinner and watched a really interesting movie called Traitor. Since our little community is becoming more firm and established we’re also spending more time doing actually “pastoral” work too – meeting people for coffee, walking through issues, etc. It’s a good thing.

Tomorrow we have a really important meeting. We’ve chosen to align our budding church community with the local Methodist church in Newcastle, essentially as sister congregations. What that means is that that their pastor, who is one of our best friends here, can invest some of his time into our community and also that they can sponsor us for our visa renewal (a new requirement since we moved over), which is approaching quickly in September. We’ll fall under what they call Pioneer Ministries – which means starting a church in a place or among a group where there is no existing work – which is a good fit. It means we won’t have much red tape but we’ll still be connected to a local group, which is a good thing missiologically, and it won’t at all be severing or diminishing our relationship with our sending churches. It’s really just sticking an official label on what God has already been doing relationally. If you have questions, we’d love to answer them via comments or email.

At any rate, this meeting tonight will hopefully make things official on their end and allow us to move ahead with the visa process. Please pray with us about this time. If it doesn’t move ahead – or even if it moves ahead too slowly – we would have to come back to the USA for 4-6 months (because of the baby being born in October) before coming back. Everything looks set to work, but please pray. It would be nice on so many fronts to be able to stay.

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