November Travels
As I mentioned in our worship time last Sunday, six of us from Greater Portland Bible Church will be leaving over the next week to visit and serve with Dan and Eva Anderson in Madrid Spain. This traveling team includes Ken and Judy Pinkerton, Sheila Michaelson, Tom Luther, Phil Muir, and myself. The Anderson’s have developed a significant ministry to North African immigrants to Spain built around their recently refurbished Friendship House. We will be helping with some of the finishing touches on the Friendship House, engaging the immigrant children in arts and crafts projects, providing conversational English practice for the adults, and whatever else Dan and Eva want us to do for them and their ministry. You can expect a Skype call from us during the worship service on November 15.
On November 16, three of us, Sheila, Phil, and myself, will travel from Madrid to the Middle East to visit and serve another Global Partner family who oversees the aid and relief ministry of several Jordanian churches to the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in Jordan. They also oversee a number of farming projects in the Jordan River Valley. Our team will get to experience and assist in both of these as well as other projects these Global Partners are involved with.
If you are willing to pray for us, please pray that all of us, the traveling team, our Global Partners, and the people we meet along the way, will know God better as a result of this trip. That’s the first thing. Only after you’ve asked for that can you then ask our Lord to make us effective in our ministry and keep us safe in our travels. You can also ask our Lord to accomplish one of my main goals for this trip which is to minister deeply to the personal, emotional, and spiritual needs of these two dear Global Partner families.
You will be treated to some excellent teachers in my absence. Brian Hope will be here on November 8. He is an acquaintance of our elders and he pastors a church in Walla Walla, Washington. Brian will be followed on the next two Sundays by two beloved members of our church, Rees Bettinger, one of our global partners, and then GPBC’s founding pastor, Lynn Kent. Lord willing, we will all be back with you for our next Community Sunday, November 29, and will give you a brief report of our trip. It promises to be a great November!
In the more immediate future, I will finish the series on prayer, Conversations With the Creator, this Sunday. We will look at the prayer of the apostle Paul in Ephesians 1 which is a model for how we should pray for each other.