Glory be, two updates in three months! This counts as progress albeit from an admittedly very low (poor) starting point. So what’s been happening since I last updated you all.

Noah’s baptism

As convinced credo-baptists it is a great moment when one of your children make the decision to be baptised. There is, of course, a lot of life (we hope) in front of the young man but as he heads towards his later teen years and adulthood this is a good marker of faith to be laying down. We’ve seen how it has become his faith in Jesus and not just his families’ faith. We’ve witnessed the way that as Noah has grown (and he’s almost as tall as me) his faith has grown with him. We trust it will continue like that throughout his life.

Proud of him. Profoundly grateful to God.

As you can see we baptised Noah (and three others) in some local water and I’m here to tell you it was pretty chilly. I’m not sure I’m hardcore enough for ice baptisms.

Conferences

October & November featured four conferences. This was both good and challenging. The challenge was that it meant frequent disruptions and absences as I returned from sabbatical. Every time I’d begin to find a rhythm and make progress on the long list of tasks, off I’d go again and it would take a couple of weeks to catch back up. It is a fair question to ask whether I should have gone to them all but here they are and you might see why it was hard to say no.

The first conference was The Nordic Gospel Coalition Conference (click on the link to read my review of it) which was not only in Stockholm but also in the church that we rent each Sunday. There genuinely aren’t that many churches in the Nordics which put the preaching of sin, repentance, salvation in Christ at the front and centre of what they do and this conference is an attempt to gather together those that do. It’s not the only such initiative but it’s a good one and we’re keen to support such things. I was also on the speaker list and took part in a seminar on expository and missional preaching.

The second conference, Newfrontiers Global, took place on the island of Cyprus. A few good reasons to go to this one, firstly a trip to head south to Cyprus in October for a few days of sun and warmth is a genuine blessing as the cold & dark set in up north. More importantly this was a gathering of leaders from all across the world who partner together in Newfrontiers. I think I was the only from the Nordic region. It was great to hear from church leaders all over the world, some in incredibly challenging places, to worship and pray together. I had been a part of a task team contributing a paper on diversity in our movement. I wrote contributions on gender & sexuality. More on that at some point in the future.

The third conference was in Ipswich, UK. This was the leadership conference of Relational Mission, a smaller family of churches within Newfrontiers. It had been a few years since the last one which took place before the pandemic so it was important to go. I flew over to the west of the UK for a few days to see my parents in Oswestry, before driving to Ipswich for the conference. It was great to see Gilbert, our Congolese leader be profiled at the conference as well as to meet Todd Morr from San Diego who has been working with us to help Grace Church keep building a missional culture. You can read more about Todd’s work here. And it was a treat to be able to stay on a day longer to be able to see my Tractor Boys play and win! Good to see some friends & watch some World Cup rugby too.

The final conference was back in Stockholm, organised by among others the Swedish Evangelical Alliance and this was again a good opportunity for me to connect with other evangelical leaders from around Sweden. I really enjoyed participating in the preaching network (all in Swedish) run by Langham Partnership. This conference was in Swedish so that was good for me.

Half-term break

Just before the last of those conferences was our half-term at the end of October and we were able to get away for a few days to the High Coast which is a stunningly beautiful part of the country. We got our first snows of the winter up there ( & which has now come south to Stockholm). Fun times.

Bits & Bobs

This has already now quite a long post so I’ll save some other things for next time. But October saw PBs for Noah & Anna at our local parkrun, winter tyres added to three bikes, and all the usual busyness of this time of year with sports, crafts, youth groups, church, work, visits, calls, meetings and more. Throughout it all God has been as good as ever, as good as always!

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If you would like to partner with us financially here’s what we’d use it for. Primarily it would enable Emma to join me on some of my travels around Europe and to some of these conferences. It would also allow more of her time to be given to serving the church, which is something she is very capable of doing. Living cross-culturally brings with it extra costs and issues of travel and recently this has become more challenging with inflation & a rising cost of living.

If you want to give to us personally you can do that via Stewardship or you can give directly to the church which will could be put either towards a future premises or our ongoing ministry costs. If you do choose to do either of these, well, we’d be incredibly thankful.