For those of you who don’t know, Agape Year is a new gap year program for recently graduated high schoolers. The program is located in Pittsburgh, and is an Anglican Global Mission Partners’ Initiative.

It was at the end of an evening plenary session at New Wineskins Global Mission Conference in 2013 that a healing and peace came over me that was totally unexpected.

I am an Anglican priest in Madrid, Spain. I often observe this practice of letting the practices of our tiny Protestant community be determined to a great extent by not doing what the Roman Catholics do. I understand the historical and contextual reasons for this practice. But in the long run it is not a recipe for fruitfulness. In the same way, the winsomeness of the Christian faith should be allowed to stand on its own.

This is now the fourth installation in my series on pastoral care for Christians who have converted from Islam. We started by addressing the issue of baptism, then the personality of God as portrayed in the Qur’an v. the Bible, and then the role of history in helping to form a firm identity for the convert.

“Jesus never raised a sword against anyone!” If that statement sounds unremarkable to you, consider how it might strike a Muslim fleeing war in his native land.

“You were made for more.” I longed to her those words as a teenager – and in some way, I think we all do, really.

I was at a meeting of pro-life leaders. Some of whom have been fighting abortion since it was legalized in 1973, and a few gave presentations reflecting their opinions of where we are in this battle for life.

When my husband Aaron was a fourth year medical student, we got to spend six weeks in a historic hospital called Kijabe. It is north of Nairobi and staying there was our first time in Africa, where we dreamed of living one day.

Familiarity with history also allows for the recognition of self-worth and value for one’s local Christian community. It was striking to see how CMBs in North Africa were energized by hearing that their local bishop martyr, Cyprian, had made such a lasting and profound impact on Christian theology and ecclesiology.

It happened twice, once in North Africa and once in Constantinople. I had been invited to give some lectures to congregations consisting mostly of Christians from a Muslim background (CMBs).

I just returned from an incredible trip with this team sharing Christ and giving goats to the Batwa pygmies in Uganda.

In 2007, my wife, Carol, and I joined another couple from Christ Church Anglican, Savannah to attend the New Wineskins Conference. The Lord used the first two talks by Bishop Derek Eaton and Bishop Rennis Ponniah, which by “accident” both focused on the call of Abraham in Geneses 12:1, to confirm a call to Carol and me to sell our business and get ready to do full time mission work.

In 2007, I performed my musical testimony, “Lord Make Me the Person You Want Me to be” in Uganda. I was invited to do this in the town of Hoima for 1,500 residents and also at Uganda Christian University (UCU) for nearly 2,000 students. It amazed me how deeply it touched the souls of those in the audience.

I’ve been a CCW for over a decade in the Middle East, Europe and the United States. Each assignment has come with its unique challenges, and I am always so grateful for what I like to call “home support.”

“An American Lent” is a journey through our country’s history of slavery, segregation, and racism with the hope of healing. The aim is that—through the prayers, reflections, and responses—to not only be grieved into repenting but that we would all leave this experience bearing fruit in keeping with repentance and be agents of healing across divisions and pain.

After spending a couple of weeks in Thailand this January, I had the opportunity to stopover in Laos for a few days on my back to Pittsburgh.

Isn’t it fun when God shows us His creative solutions to situations in our lives? That is exactly what happened with the ‘Jewelry With A Purpose’ project.

As Christians, we are all called to be mission-minded, seeing ourselves as everyday missionaries wherever we happen to live and at whatever life stage we happen to be.

In October of 2018 we founded al kanisa al masihiya fi Madrid—the Christian Church of Madrid—an Arabic-language weekly fellowship. We were meeting in a borrowed space from a Latino Assemblies of God congregation in Tetuan, a neighborhood with a large Muslim population north of downtown.

Most of us recognise that we live in a very big, very complex world where there’s a lot going on in the global church that we’re not aware of or that we don’t quite understand. Most of us also recognise that God desires his people to pray for his will to be done, and his kingdom to come, on earth as it is in heaven.