Worldly Holiness

Well, the Larsen boys are back from our adventures, Erick to Oman and me to Malta. I haven't gotten the full run down yet from Erick, but understand that things went well for him with some new understanding of that part of the world and friendships.

I am a little tired from my time in Malta. It was a full packed schedule with keynote speakers, smaller workshops on many topics like media, member care issues [that means the stuff we all deal with living and ministering in our context, cross-culturally, that may require some special assistance], etc. There was a core track woven throughout the conference that featured ministry highlights from each country across the region. This was very helpful in giving a bird’s eye view of what God is doing and who the players are. I was able to also engage in a ton of networking with others focusing on this region and type of ministry with our focus people. The value of this last piece is huge and will have implications down the road as the Mosaics project takes more definitive shape and we grasp our specific roles in the panorama of ministry options. My time with colleague, Ken S. [ www.mosaicsworld.blogspot.com ] was also very good. We spent a lot of time debriefing some of the keynote sessions and explored important questions for our own ministry. And we networked. A lot of new ideas and crucial connections.

Ken and I, sometimes along with Erik Amundsen [son of Byron and Judy, our bosses in Mission Headquarters in Chicago…well not really “bosses”], got out in the community a few times to see the area, have a good cappuccino [see pictures to the side] and refresh our minds before we went back into sessions at the conference. This was an important aspect of our time to maintain our sanity. After all, the mind and heart can only absorb as much as the butt can endure! Malta is an interesting place that has a long history of military campaigns being fought on their small but strategic piece of land in the middle of the Mediterranean. The ones who were most recently on top were the British. That explains why they drove on the wrong side of the street, spoke English well, and had these old buses [photo] from England in the bus fleet. Maltese, the native language is a Semitic language put to a Latin alphabet. Very interesting.

By the way, Malta is not the piece of land at the end of the boot of Italy that I mistakenly mentioned in my last post before I left. That would be Sicily. How dumb of me. Malta is at the end of the soccer ball, much smaller, and is what they call an “archipelago!” Look that one up on Wikipedia. While you are there look up Malta and you will find some fascinating history. Well, I better get back to unpacking and sorting. You could take that to mean my clothes, as well as all the business cards and little pieces of paper with important contact information on them in my shirt pockets, backpack and who knows where else. If you’d like an issue related report from the conference, let me know and I can email that to you. As always, leave a comment or send a greeting. You can also find a set of 55 photos from my trip in the flickr site to the right.

Vale! Venga! Ciao. 

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