SABBATICAL REPORT

“Give thanks to the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the peoples,
Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously, let this be known in all the earth.”
(Isaiah 12: 4, 5)

In celebration of my 25th anniversary on staff at Tenth Church in September, many of you contributed toward my sabbatical, which goes approximately from Christmas to Easter. I praise God for His faithfulness during my 25 years of service here. I also thank all of you for your friendship and encouragement and your prayers over the years, and for making this sabbatical adventure.

I left Philadelphia on Christmas Eve to celebrate the holiday with my sister and her husband in San Diego, California. The highlights of that time were a hike on Christmas day over hills that had been charred during the recent wildfires, and the joy of seeing fresh shoots of grass growing amid the ashes. (This part of the country, which is basically desert, has had an extraordinary amount of rain since the fires, which fed on tinder produced by several years’ drought.) It was a great reminder that God has promised to give us “Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning.” The day after Christmas we went to see the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls at a museum here. It was very thrilling to see something with my own eyes that I had only heard about over the years. As I took in the background information about the community that produced these scrolls and how in God’s providence they had been stored in a way and a climate that preserved them for two millenia or more, I was thrilled to think that “The word of the LORD endures forever.”

This Thursday I left for the next phase of my sabbatical: a trip to Asia. By the time you read this I should have arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to be met by our own Ken Rudy, who has made arrangements for my time there, working with a church in Phnom Penh, doing a variety of things, and certainly teaching English. Tenth Church already has strong ties with this congregation: Ken and Donna Rudy have worked with them, a short term team from Tenth Church went over to minister there in summer of 2006, and Naty Lopez spent time with the pastor and his wife on her visit there this past summer.

In early March, I hope to travel to other parts of southeast Asia to visit some of our partners who are working there, starting with Shelagh Wynne in Thailand, who is serving people who are teaching English throughout that region, then on to Hanoi, to visit one of our former staff members who is teaching English there, and finally to Seoul, to visit Danya Kelberg, who is teaching English to prospective Korean missionaries. I feel extraordinarily privileged to be able to visit partners in these places and to see what God is doing there.

Although my original travel plans were much more ambitious than this, taking in New Zealand and Hawaii, the Lord has helped me pare this down to doable proportions. Just before Easter, which comes on March 23 this year, I plan to head back to Philadelphia in order not to miss the Easter services at Tenth Church. Where else on earth would anyone find such glorious worship services?