Bull Riding

Nick’s dream was to ride the bulls in the rodeo. For years he lived in his truck, traveling from rodeo to rodeo and riding the meanest, most ordnery bulls that the US had to offer. He was injured many times, breaking ribs, hip and legs as well as other injuries. Once he even rode with a broken ankle, strapped up tight by a local medic, and trying to remember that when he jumped off he should try and land on the other ankle!

He won a national championship, (the start of his winning ride pictured above). The times that he won were good - hotels, baths and steak meals, for him and his friends. They were a tight-knit group and when one was fortunate they all shared in the glory and sudden wealth. After the money was gone, Nick went back to living in his truck. One day he met a Christian cowboy, someone who took Jesus seriously. Nate, against his better judgement, was powerfully drawn to Jesus and decided to trust him. The result was total ostracism by his friends. Once word got around that he had “got religion” none of his former friends would even speak to him. Eventually he left the rodeo circuit and went to the Philippines to serve for a year or two. The challenges of a demanding physical environment, of a variable living standard, of being in a situation where violence can flare unexpectedly were meat and drink to him! He met and married Emma, a Filipina Christian, who had grown up, jumping in and out of trenches and bunkers in the war-torn south where the army had battled Muslim extremist rebels for decades. No strangers to hardship, they decided together to join OMF for long-term service.

Nick and Emma came through our latest Orientation Course, in November. This was the biggest group of new members that OMF has ever had - forty-two people and sixteen children. The youngest was in his early twenties (a footballer who previously played for the Swiss junior national team) and the oldest in his mid-fifties (a colonel in the Canadian Air Force who took early retirement). They each told their stories during the course of the training. Over and over again, the theme was heard, “I believe in Jesus because someone else I know lived for Him and cared enough and was courageous enough to tell me about Him.” Sometimes it was a parent, sometimes a friend, often a stranger. Sometimes people were driven by a search for God and a hunger for purity, sometimes there was terror and hopelessness following the death of a father or a beloved sister or abuse or a broken family, sometimes loneliness and emptiness and a hunger for significance other than materialism, sex and drugs. Sometimes it was a surprise - God breaking in to lives that were complacent and satisfied, where people felt no need at all of anything other than what they had. Sometimes it was the testimony of a consistent life lived well for God, sometimes just a fleeting contact - a talk, a book or a tract, just a Bible verse pressed into a hand.

An Asian colleague lived in agony over the death of her sister in a car crash, in horror and fear at the thought of her own death. One day, while praying and burning incense, she got up and walked over to the image that she prayed to until she was nose to nose with it. “I screamed at it”, she said, “but I realized it could not hear my words. Its blank eyes could not see my pain. It could not help me - in fact every day we had to help it - feed it and clothe it.” This startling image of a young girl, tortured by grief and fear, head to head with a household god, screaming at his impotence in the face of her raw human experience was an echo of the powerful words of Psalm 115. Trying to live by anything other than God is to “feed on ashes”. As we listened, it was a reminder again of how God meets us as individuals - endlessly creative and resourceful in His powerful, potent work of reconciling us who were His enemies to Himself.

“Only God keeps this ship afloat!”

Built in 1914, the M.V. Doulos is just two years younger than the Titanic. The boast of the Titanic’s builders was “even God himself couldn’t sink this ship.” As the Doulos crew members look at the battered sides and struggle with the ancient engineering systems on board, they wryly say to each other, “it’s only God that keeps this ship afloat!” The Doulos is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest ship still afloat. Having started life as a freighter on the Atlantic coast of America, she was converted to a passenger ship and used to ship emigrants to Australia as well as Roman Catholic pilgrims to Italy.

Finally in 1977, she was bought by a Christian organization in Germany, refitted in Bremen and began a new lease of life. The Doulos is now the worlds largest bookshop, carrying 6, 000 titles across the oceans. Since 1977, she has visited more than 100 countries and welcomed more than 18 million people on board. The Doulos arrived at the quayside in Singapore last week. Crewed by around 350 Christian young people and families from over 50 different countries, including friends of ours, Aimee and Joshua welcomed the chance to go on board. Josh has now declared that he’s found his ideal project for his gap year – as a crew member on the Doulos!

“…as you help us by your prayers".

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.” Paul in Second Corinthians

A week ago, Steve went to see the cardiologist for his regular four month check-up. Dr Chan spent more time discussing his recent trip to Cambodia with us than he did Steve’s condition! That was a good sign. The next check-up will be in six months while Steve continues on low-dose medication. Later, Anna read the passage above which seemed so apposite. More than ever, we are coming to rely on God, learning in pressures and hardships and suffering not to depend on feelings but on what God has told us about Himself and His purposes. We thank God for His present deliverance and we thank you too for your prayers on our behalf.

Out of the blue, a few days ago, Joshua suddenly asked, “What would you say if I told you I was thinking about going to Hebron School?” You may remember that two and a half years ago, Josh and Steve traveled together to India to scout out Hebron as a possible place for Josh to board. The change of direction to Singapore meant that Josh could stay with us for the time being. However, now he has decided he might want to spread his wings and head off to India after all. Josh is earnestly praying, together with the family as we make enquiries, work out costs and determine logistics – to get a clear picture of what it might mean. Please pray for guidance for Josh as he works this idea through and also for us as we help and advise him.

The children are hard at work at school but also are very involved in the demanding production of “Peter Pan”. Yesterday (Saturday) they were at school from 11:00 until 6:00. Josh has no understudy, even though he has the lead role. Both children were unwell during the past week. Please do pray for them, to remain healthy in the next four weeks until the play run actually starts and that they will demonstrate character in remaining cheerful and positive while avoiding grumbling and fighting, not only in the public eye but also at home!

Jonny Elvin, the vicar of Trinity Church, Exeter came out to see us for a week. He joined us during several weeks of a thick blanket of smoke haze covering Singapore caused by uncontrolled forest fires in Sumatra and Borneo. That didn’t help the holiday snaps! But it was wonderful to renew friendship, to have up-to-date news of the church family in Exeter, to talk through issues that we are mutually grappling with, to encourage one another to stand firm. We had a chance to race each other on the luge track at Sentosa (not on ice but on wheels!), to enjoy the beach, to bike-ride and roller blade along the East Coast and to sample the many and varied delights of Singaporean food courts! A highlight was a moving visit to Changi Jail museum where thousands were detained during the Second World War. The horror of those days was clearly depicted but there was a powerful underlying theme of sustaining faith that came through over and over again – the centre-point of the museum were murals painted by a desperately ill prisoner, only able to work for fifteen minutes at a time...he had painted Jesus being nailed to the cross and above it, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

From next week, we will be involved in the last Orientation Course of 2006. This time forty-two adults and sixteen children will take part. We look forward to having them – but it will be a busy time too as we interview each person, lead worship, teach and speak as well as enjoy the various activities that will be going on. Our fellow Directors are very busy at the moment, with visits to sensitive areas of Asia, traveling to encourage and support home and field teams, and coping with complex issues. Several OMFers are seriously ill in various parts of the globe. Please do help us by your prayers.

Love from us all

Steve, Anna, Josh and Aimee

Avoiding Idolatry

Idolatry is a strange word. It's a word associated with primitive cultures, with mysterious statues and dark temples, with pre-scientific societies. But here are the words of a TCK:

"I could not hope to hold my father's attention, to be the voice he recorded, his microphone trained on the purest sounds of Chokwe and Lungwe, tapes as big as dinner plates twirling. I found my mother at the clinic dressing burns and dispensing drugs to women coughing blood. These people in their wretchedness perfectly deserved my mother's care. She bowed with them, freckled hand on spongy curls, offered up a prayer for healing. If only I could do something to earn her touch. Because I could not distract my parents from their missionary service, I shadowed them. Their work became mine; their calling so big it overshadowed any puny need of my own. I understood when my father left the dinner table to greet this teacher or that pastor that I would have to share my parents. I cringe at my continuing need to feel significant to them, my need to earn degrees, win prizes and contracts. Sometimes I feel obsessed, as though I possess a deep well that needs constant filling with attention."

This approach where work takes over and constantly demands time and attention that belongs to children, God calls idolatry even when it is found in a Christian family.

In the TCK consultation held last week we looked together at the story of Hannah. Desperate for a child Hannah wept and prayed before God, promising that any child that was given she would surrender to God to serve him all his days. Her request was granted in an amazing way, and Samuel joined their family. It would be easy for Hannah to justify keeping such a precious baby. And yet Hannah put God in first place and gave Samuel up to serve in the temple at Shiloh. As the "TCK support team" we need to help families not to meet an unbalanced approach to work with an equally unbalanced approach - that the family must always come first! For putting anything before God is to make an idol of that thing, no matter how intrinsically worthy it may be.

The consultation drew together a multicultural international team. Altogether we represented more than 20 different countries, and a multitude of educational systems, German, Korean, Japanese, Afrikaans, Tagalog and everything in between! There are more than 600 children whose parents are serving in Asia and they use a wide variety of educational options. Some families are able to use international schools and boarding schools are still used, but we need to make more support available for non-traditional schooling options. Many of our families are working in areas far from other expatriates. For some of these families, schooling their children at home is one way of meeting their needs in a tough situation. We want to find home school tutors, teachers who are willing to live at a single location, and travel from that location to advise parents who are homeschooling their children. Over the next few years, we're going to need more and more teachers willing to work in this way. Please pray with us that the right people will come forward. We recognize that happy, healthy, holy families are better enabled to realise the vision to which God has called OMF.

Two days ago, Joshua decided to head-butt the floor. He'd been sitting for a while playing on the computer, stood up suddenly, felt faint, and fell forward mashing his lip on a metal door frame. We mention this because yesterday was Joshua's 13th birthday. In his birthday photographs, he looks as if he has done three rounds with Mike Tyson! It's terrifying to be the parents of a teenager. We don't feel old enough or able enough to take on this next role! I don't know when the last time you went shopping for a teenager, but trying to choose a present for Joshua was next to impossible. So armed with money from grandparents, Dad and Joshua sallied forth to do business with Singapore's shopping district. After 4 1/2 hours shopping, Dad was relieved to discover that Joshua didn't have much idea what he wanted either. He's a pretty contented sort of guy! So the money will sit in his room until he's decided what he needs it for!

With our love,

Steve, Anna, Josh and Aimee

Pilgrims or Tourists?

"They are perpetual outsiders, born in one nation, raised in others, [shuttling] back and forth between nations, languages, cultures and loyalties. They live unrooted childhoods. Lifted from one home and set down in another, these children learn not to attach too deeply. Yet despite their resistance to rooting, these children need a sense of belonging, a way to integrate their many cultural selves and find a place in the world".

Unrooted Childhoods: Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel

Born in Zimbabwe, raised in Mozambique, schooled in Cambodia, England and Singapore, Joshua started life trying to add Portuguese and some Makua to his English. He learned to fit into an American school in Cambodia, struggled in England because he knew nothing about soccer and now has a lead role in a play speaking Mandarin. He is the only Caucasian in the youth group at church. Like Steve, Josh and Aim struggle to answer the question, "Where do you come from?" We are enriched by our experiences but find that we also wrestle with a sense of rootlessness and identity. We are Third Culture Kids, 'individuals who have spent a significant part of our developmental years in a culture other than our parents'. We have relationship to many cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Elements from each culture are mixed into the TCK's life but the sense of belonging is to others of similar experience.

There are more than six hundred children whose parents serve with OMF. Over the next ten days we will be leading the Third Culture Kid Advisors' consultation - for those from both homes and fields who are responsible for advising on the education and care of our children. We will work together to plan for the next three years or so, as well as doing some training. As we have particular responsibilities for member care (including kids!), we would ask your prayer for us during this time.

We had a day off on Monday and took the children to see Dr Yee - our dentist. Are we all having fun yet?! But that didn't last long and we headed for Sentosa, a smaller island off the coast of Singapore Island but connected by a long causeway. On Sentosa are some of the famed coastal defences - the gun batteries that were facing the wrong way when the Japanese invaded. From Fort Siloso there are some magnificent views out across one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. But we headed for Mount Imbiah where a luge run has been set up. For a small fee you can hire a low-slung "sled" on wheels and race down a winding track - Josh and Aimee loved it, and Mum and Dad didn't mind it either. At the bottom there is a chair lift which very conveniently took us back to our starting point again. The thick haze from massive forest fires just across the straits in Sumatra, cut visibility right down but fortunately didn't cause any breathing problems! Josh has chosen to go back to the luge for his birthday celebration with his three closest friends. But we've had to postpone it for two weeks until the end of Ramadan, as two of his friends are Muslim and so would be fasting during the day - not much fun to go to a birthday party under those conditions

Love from us all

Steve, Anna, Josh and Aimee

Grace Like Rain

24^th September, 2006

John Wilson* was bishop of the Anglican cathedral when Singapore fell to the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. During the fighting the Cathedral's nave was converted into a casualty station to care for the wounded, where Bishop Wilson helped to care for the wounded and dying - the fighting coming so close that in the cathedral yard was burnt out military vehicles. In March 1943 Bishop Wilson was arrested and made a prisoner-of-war. Along with around 3000 others he was imprisoned at the notorious Changi jail and brutally tortured during repeated interrogations. However he continued to love and pray for his captors and to serve his fellow prisoners - even taking beatings meant for inmates he considered too sick or weak to cope. At the end of the war he returned to lead the team at the cathedral. One day while conducting baptisms, Bishop Wilson recognised a Japanese officer among the candidates - one of the very men who had viciously flogged Wilson. The Japanese soldier told Wilson he had come to believe in Jesus through Wilson's witness. He asked for Bishop Wilson's forgiveness and then requested that the Bishop baptise him into the faith.

Today Chris Chia, our pastor, shared this story to remind us of the staggering power of the saving grace of Jesus as he led a service of baptism. The service was translated into Mandarin for the benefit of dozens of older relatives and friends specially attending. Today no less than eighty people declared their faith through baptism before around a thousand folk packing the school hall. Chris prayed powerfully and originally for each person. We sat and watched with tears in our eyes - the fruit of the unseen and forgotten workers who had given their lives in the past to make the Good News known to the Chinese was there before us. A grandmother was baptised together with her grandchildren. Parents and children baptised as a family. A knot of elderly Cantonese-speaking women, some too frail to stand on their own. Indonesian believers and a Japanese woman. What a privilege to witness the result of the faithfulness of those gone before us.

In March 1929, after conducting a careful survey and following a meeting of the C.I.M. Central Council, the then General Director issued a call for "some two hundred workers over two years" to meet the needs of the neglected in-land areas of China. It was an inauspicious time to do so - with the Great Depression taking hold worldwide and a massive upsurge of lawlessness in China itself. In September of the same year, C.I.M. missionary Douglas Pike was taken prisoner by bandits and executed, one of several to die that year. Two of his grown children, Walter and Allison offered and were accepted as members of the "two hundred" (eventually 207). Walter was Anna's grandfather.

Seventy-seven years later, Anna found herself a member of that same Council, listening to the results of a similar survey and debating its implications for OMF. The Council heard of the continuing needs of the Buddhist world, of the challenges and advances of Muslim outreach, of going the second mile in helping the burgeoning Chinese church to reach out in mission, of the need for workers to reach the hundreds of millions in the Asian Diaspora scattered across the world. Next week together with the General Director, we will work on the wording of a final statement and call for workers. Please pray specially for us. We have no interest in building the "kingdom of OMF". The desire of our hearts is to hear the voice of God, to glorify Him and to call others to join in God's mission to the world, to see grace fall like rain in our broken and hurting world.

With our love

Steve, Anna, Joshua & Aimée Griffiths

* The story is told in the book "John Leonard Wilson: Confessor for the Faith by Roy McKay "

Passion for the Impossible

It's been a chilly 27 degrees in Singapore today. We've wrapped up warmly (!) and shivered our way through church today! The tropical rain has thundered down, lashing the massive trees in the Botanic Gardens just across the road and sending roaring torrents of water down the storm drains that run below our window. Lightning strikes have kept us jumping! In a brief, dry spell this afternoon, Anna and I lay flat on our backs on the back veranda and watched the massive clouds go scudding across the sky, driven and torn by the wind. Exhilarating!

Our church here in Singapore is slightly different to Great Missenden! Around 800 people attend the 9:00am service in a school hall (and a similar number the 11:00). Although services are mainly conducted in English, the vast majority of people are young Singaporean Chinese - a reflection of the huge growth in the number of Christians here. The music is very good and the minister, Chris Chia, is a former journalist who speaks thoughtfully and compellingly. He often holds a newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other - quoting from both!

Tomorrow is the big day....once every three years, the entire OMF leadership from 30 different countries get together for a week for what we call International Council. It will be a time to renew friendships, to look back on what God has done since the last time we met and also to pray, to discuss and work on the direction that OMF should take for the next three years. Our theme is "Passion for the Impossible - Reaching the Neglected Frontiers. OMF has always wanted to work at the cutting edge of God's mission- where there are few or no followers of the Lord Jesus. We're asking if there are areas or peoples that need to hear the Good News - and then asking what (if anything) OMF should do about it. For the first time in it's 140-year history, a Chinese, Dr Patrick Fung, leads OMF. This will be his first Council in the driving seat.

Last week, the Council began arriving. Anna and I in our role of International Director of Personnel had meetings with each OMF Director - ranging from Canada to Korea. Twenty-four formal meetings in thirty-six hours was no joke!

We've been working hard on preparing for our own sessions for weeks now - still some of the finishing touches to go. We're looking at who is joining OMF - it's exciting to see the number of Asians in OMF growing to around 40%. We have Japanese Christians reaching out to Cambodians, Koreans going to Thailand, Burmese taking up the challenge of work in tough areas of South-east Asia. But we need to ask if we need to do more to help Asians to join us.

We're also asking questions about giving better care on the field . We have 1, 100 missionaries serving with OMF. Many work scattered across vast areas, or in parts of Asia where it is not easy to communicate directly with them. Amazingly, in a recent survey over 70% reported a sense of contentment. Over 90% felt at home in the country they were working in - perhaps because OMF places such a strong emphasis on language learning and understanding the culture. But many are facing fear, frustration, loneliness, misunderstanding, and poor support. We want to do all we can to make sure that our people don't just survive but thrive. But how can we set about that effectively? Pray for us as we lead the discussion.

Josh and Aimée are hard at work, back at the Canadian School. They travel (alone) on the public bus system to work every day. Singapore is a very secure place in many ways which gives our kids freedom to do things that they probably woudn't be able to do at home. We were out last night with friends from Cambodia, eating Indian and Chinese food which the children love. Josh has landed the part of Peter Pan in a school production of the play - rehearsals start tomorrow and will be very intense until just before Christmas. He's not too sure about having to kiss Wendy but is willing to endure pain and suffering for the sake of art! Aimée is going to be a mermaid - disappointed to miss out on being a Lost Boy or a pirate, "because they get to fight one another!" Still, slight and willowy as she is, we think it was a good casting choice!

We'll sign off here, (our first attempt at blogging!) and try to keep you updated from time to time!

Steve, Anna, Joshua and Aimée

Old missionaries!

Anna's great-grandparents in China in the 1920’s

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watch this space...