On Board the Ark

We spoke at a great service tonight on board the Ark! This is the name given to a building owned by the Horden (Co. Durham) Victory Church to reach into the community in creative ways. It was a lovely and blessed service. PTL!

We have got in some good healthy exercise yesterday and today walking beaches, climbing cliffs and exploring the countryside.

Great Lumley & Bishop Auckland

Today we've had a very good day of ministry. We had a lovely service this morning at Great Lumley Evangelical Church (below) where we travelled from Horden with my cousin Philip and his wife Debbie. After the service we took part in a church fellowship lunch.

This evening we were in Bishop Auckland at the Wear Valley Christian Centre where the service was wonderful. PTL!

A lovely time in London

We  travelled from Basingstoke to London on Thursday afternoon and yesterday we made the most of the nice weather to first of all go to Kew Botanical Gardens which was absolutely great. After spending hours there, and doing lots of walking, we headed for North Kensington/Notting Hill where I was brought up. We visited my first house (where I was brought up and lived in childhood and youth). Not much appeared to have changed.

From there we went on to see my first school and my first church - Peniel Chapel. Then to QPR's stadium etc. It was all lovely.

Now we are all set to leave for the train station to go to Co. Durham for a week's ministry prior to going on to Scotland the following weekend for ministry there too. Your prayers are valued.

Team Work

My laptop is now up and running to full capacity. A man at Fleet kindly worked over the weekend to get it working again and replaced the hard disk successfully copying all the data from the old one. However when I received the computer back from him there were still a few lesser, but important, problems to fix which he couldn't do because of him not speaking Portuguese etc. So yesterday I contacted my technician in Patos who corrected the rest of the problems by remote control from Patos. The mind boggles!

I dispached the EAB Diary Update yesterday. I have also posted news from the 15th anniversary of EAB/ACEV's 2nd church in Campina Grande which is really flourishing by the grace of God. See photo below from the celebrations.

I have been clearing up the backlog of emails and we are now about to go to the Lavender Farm near West Wellow to have a light lunch prior to going to speak at the Shirley Warren Baptist Church followed by a meal at Ken Rashleigh's flat in Southampton. Tomorrow we head back to London prior to getting the train to Durham on Saturday for ministry in the north-east of England.

What a bargain!

Liz & I went and picked up the repaired computer about lunch time today at Fleet. It has a new hard disk with all that was on the old one transferred (we hope). I have now had to uninstall Norton Internet Security and reinstall it and am now in the process of doing a complete check/sweep on the computer which will take a few hours. By tomorrow I should have a good idea of the complete situation but I am hopeful.

After this we went to see dear Mum who was not having a good day.

From them we went to M&S to buy me a new cardigan as my old one has had it! Lo and behold we bumped into Mike Hollow (ex-Tearfund who has been in our home in Patos) and his wife! She kindly gave us a voucher and explained that with it I would get a 20% discount! So we ended up not paying for the arms of the cardigan, so to speak. In little ways like this we see God caring for us through the loving care of His people.

Pigs in the New Forest

We got back to England from Switzerland on Saturday evening and even managed to get our computer to a technician at Fleet prior to sleeping at Basingstoke. It looks like the problem is the HD as we had suspected. He's working on it. Please pray.

On Sunday morning we left earlier than planned owing to the fog and arrived bright and early at Cadnam Methodist Church where we had a lovely service followed by a beautiful lunch at Howard & Hillary's home. Driving through the New Forest we were surprised to see lots of large healthy pigs grazing freely on acorns! We're used to seeing ponies, cattle and deer but pigs was a new one for us!

On Wednesday we will be at the Shirley Warren Baptist Church in Southampton prior to going by train to the north-east next Saturday.

Lovely time in Switzerland nears end

Yesterday evening's family & friends fellowship and food time was lovely with 2 gigantic one meter long sandwiches filled with everything delicious imaginable! This all took place at Sam & Gerti's house in Winterthur.

This morning we visited the jumble sale Gerti and her friend Marianne are running for EAB and now we are about to eat an amazing lunch cooked by Sam!

We leave for the airport in an hour's time.