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August 2016
Our Next Assignment Begins…Â
It is with great excitement and expectation that we can finally announce that we are launching into our next God-given assignment. During this past month we completed the Missionary Preparation Training with Go To Nations at the World Headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida and were presented with our certificates by the President, Dr. Jerry Williamson and Executive Vice President of Ministries, Nancy Lovelace. So it’s official! We are now full-time Go To Nations Missionaries! Â
God has been preparing us our entire lives for this very moment! We now have an amazing opportunity to take all the life experience, gifting, training and skills we have gained in the business world, international mission field, non-profit organizations, church, ministries and community arenas and have a greater global impact in the Nations than ever before. Our role, which fits perfectly with our passion and hearts’ desire, is to serve the 881 Go To Nations Missionaries and National Workers, together investing our lives in amazing life changing projects, in more than 96 countries, bringing resources and sustainable development to some of the most challenging parts of the world!
Inspiring New Missionary Recruits…Â
As Missions Mobilizers working with the Go To Nations Mobilization Team, we will be involved in the recruitment and equipping of new missionaries. We are passionate about inspiring young people to become world changers and help them maximize their potential as they find their God given purpose and destiny. The new missionary on the far right in the picture above is Michael Biggs, one of the Christ For the Nations Missions students we trained and equipped from September to December last year. We facilitated his going to Go To Nations Missions’ Field School in Thailand from January to March 2016 and he just completed the Missionary Preparation training with us and is now a Go To Nations Missionary. He is heading back to Thailand in January, for the start of his 2 year Missions Apprenticeship. Michael was keen to remind us that every life he and his ministry will impact in future years will be part of our legacy too, as a direct result of our encouragement and investment in him.Â
Empowering Native Pastors…
We will be facilitating missions training for national and international pastors and leaders, equipping them with tools to mobilize their churches to advance the Great Commission. By connecting Churches worldwide with the resources and opportunities available through Go To Nations, we will play a strategic role in mobilizing the Body of Christ globally to take their place in God’s plan for the world, reaching people we could never reach alone.
From the Neighborhood to the Nations…Â For the past 10 years as pastors in England the tag line of our ministry has been bringing positive change to our community. We now have an opportunity to take this positive change to a Global level!
Our Next Step is to travel and share our vision and financial goals and identify those whom God is leading to partner with us. We are thankful for all the significant relationships we have established and would love to have you as part of our monthly partnership team! Please prayerfully consider taking your place on our team!
TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
Go To Nations Missionaries have already planted more than 4,700 native churches, graduated 23,000 Bible College students, built orphanages, dug water wells, facilitated medical missions, been in the forefront of the battle against sex trafficking, established feeding programs, developed sustainable farming and have had the privilege of seeing more than 1.5 million people come to a personal relationship with Jesus.
Our 2020 Goal is to launch 1,000 missionaries, each being instrumental in bringing hope & restoration through the Good News of the Gospel, demonstrating God’s heart for the nations in practical ways.
The World is waiting for us!
Our team needs you!
This new and exciting assignment is our greatest personal challenge to date! It requires a greater level of faith and trust than ever before, but we know that God is faithful. For maximum impact, we will need to relocate from the UK to the US to work directly as a strategic part of the Go To Nations World Headquarters Leadership Team. Our US Visa applications are under way and we are in the process of developing an International Partnership Team.
We appreciate your prayer for:
God’s provision & protection as we travel.
Our family as we make this transition.
Continued Good Health.
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Exciting Opportunities Ahead!…Â 
In our final days serving at Go To Nations in Jacksonville, Florida, we had a meeting with the President, Dr. Jerry Williamson.
Following God’s Plan…
One of our main activities during our time here has been to help with a 3 week Leadership Development Forum for 11 Missionary Families, who have travelled to Florida from other parts of the US, the Philippines, Thailand, Greece and Vietnam.
Our serving has consisted of various roles including cleaning and preparing the Ministry Centre ready for their arrival, shopping for supplies and welcome gifts, serving meals and refreshments, capturing the teaching sessions on video, sound and visual media, bringing the Go To Nations Global Missionary database up to date by helping transfer their information to a new system and anything else that needed our input. 
It’s not 
always easy to serve Missionaries as they are so used to being the ones who sacrifice so much to selflessly serve others! It has been an honor to be a blessing to these 11 families each day and volunteer alongside a great team of amazing people at the World Headquarters to give them a great experience. We have had the opportunity to sit on most of the Leadership Development Teaching sessions and have really enjoyed hearing the Heart of GTN from their Executive Team and getting to see first hand how Go To Nations operates Globally. GTN has been in operation for more than 30 years and currently supports more than 800 missionaries impacting over 93 countries throughout the world. 
The Missionaries they support are involved with so many wonderful projects such as Church Planting, setting up and supporting Orphanages, Feeding Programs, Community Health, Aid and Relief Projects to the Poor, Aquaponics Projects, working with Refugees, Bible Schools and they are in the forefront of the battle against Human Trafficking.
We have been staying with a delightful couple, John & Carolyn Ellis, in an apartment above their garage which they built 25 years ago for use by visiting missionaries. They are now retired and in their late 70s and mid 80s and are a real blessing to so many people. We have enjoyed hearing about the many adventures they have had. They have visited 30 Countries and are still world travelers! They have loaned us their car for a few weeks to save us renting one and blessed us further by filling it up with fuel before handing us the keys.
We have quite a few 4-legged neighbors, Lizards of all sorts that climb the walls outside our apartment, that seem to greet us as we leave at 7.30am each morning for our drive to GTN HQ. They don’t stay around long when we appear but seeing their little legs scurry away is quite cute! Thankfully we haven’t had any inside yet as that might be a different story! Our hosts were telling us that there are Raccoons, Eagles, Osprey and all manner of other wildlife around our home! There are even Alligators in the small creek that runs past the end of the garden! We will stick to enjoying the lizards and leave their much larger cousins to swim undisturbed!
We drove 8 hours on our day off last Saturday from Jacksonville to St. Petersburg and back to swap our loan vehicles after the first month and Julie had to drive one of the vehicles for 100 miles in the rain that day. 
This was her first time driving in the US for 13 years, but she did well considering it was on the wrong side of the road and the wrong side of the car!!!!
We would love you to partner with us in bringing hope and restoration to the lives of thousands of people worldwide by giving a regular financial gift, large or small as we continue to impact Nations and fulfill the Great Commission. 
if you have a car we could use in the UK for all or part of this time, please let us know.
Everyone was really pleased to see us and encouraged by how well Julie looks. We had a really busy first seven days trying to fit everyone in who wanted to get together with us. We enjoyed dinner at Rod & Celeste Groomer’s home and hearing all about their latest venture to serve the First Nation Native Americans. Apologies to all those we didn’t get to visit! Jalee & Martha Gill took us out to dinner and we were blessed to be able to catch up with their daughter, Courtney, who interned with us at our Church in England and who had returned briefly from the UK to attend her Granddad’s funeral.
We enjoyed interacting with and encouraging the Global Missions Major Students and had the opportunity to speak to more than a hundred of the 3rd year students at the final session of one of the classes we would have been teaching this semester. We were overwhelmed by their standing ovation as we were introduced.
We also spoke at the Children’s and Family Major Graduation Dinner and shared how Childrens’ and Family Outreach had played such a big part in our ministry since graduating from CFNI in 2004. We had fun sharing part of our journey and we ended with Julie leading an Action Song! This was a real test of her energy levels as she hadn’t done this for almost 12 months, but as usual she put maximum effort into it and enjoyed getting everyone involved.
We were honoured to attend the CFNI Graduation Ceremony for all students completing their studies and this was a major reason for the timing of our visit.
Our time in Dallas was a great opportunity to spend time with Nina (our ‘Filipina Daughter’) and see her graduate, along with many of our other students who are now great friends too!
We were thankful to have the opportunity to visit Trinity, our home church in Dallas, and enjoyed catching up with our Pastor Jim Hennesy over lunch. He is always such a great encouragement to us! We also met with several of our friends on staff at Trinity and were thrilled to hear all the exciting things that are happening at the church and in the local community. We seemed to fit a month’s worth of activity into our first week in Dallas and thankfully didn’t have time for jetlag! Thanks to everyone for your continued love and support!
After spending a week in Dallas we flew to Colorado for 4 days to attend our friends, Rick & Joan’s, daughter’s wedding. They were CFNI students with us in 2003/04 and we had great fun catching up with them. 
The wedding was outdoors and we met some great people before and after the wedding ceremony. Rick & Joan took us on a trip into the mountains of Colorado and we stopped off at Andrew Wommack’s amazing Charis Bible College, over looking Pikes Peak on the way. After a day exploring Eleven Mile Canyon, in the wilds of Colorado, where we saw lots of wildlife and got to feed the 
wild chipmunks, we stopped off on the way home to visit Rick & Joan’s friends in their cabin in the mountains and we had a great evening eating and chatting around the campfire.
We flew back to Dallas midweek to speak at Trinity Church Missions Class and felt really encouraged by the people we met there. We have been Trinity Missionaries for the past 13 years and the church has recently started sending us monthly financial support.
We were blessed to be loaned a 2001 Honda CRV for a month from Missionary Ministries and drove up the East Coast of Florida to Jacksonville. 
We stopped off briefly for a quick photograph at the lake view gazebo in the grounds of the hotel where we married in Orlando, Florida, 17 years ago! We could never have guessed how our lives would have turned out when we started out married life together in 1999 and are so thankful God joined us together for this journey!
upstairs Garage Apartment with our hosts John & Carolyn Ellis, who built the apartment at their home and have been allowing visiting missionaries 
to use it for more than 25 years. It is a really comfortable one bedroom facility and we are grateful for being allowed use of it. We liaised with Go To Nations from September to December last year when we arranged for the Global Missions Students from Christ For The Nations to attend their Missions Field Schools in Thailand and Honduras.
Our life journey often resembles that of a rollercoaster ride! The ups and downs, twists and
We hadn’t visited our family since before treatment started in January, so seeing Julie looking so healthy was such a relief to her Mum, Children and Grandkids. It was a pretty full on week, with trips to the park and boating lake and an afternoon at the Movies. We joined in with a Good Friday Service in Cwmbran Shopping Centre and enjoyed the Easter Sunday Service at Victory Church, Cwmbran, before 
taking Julie’s Mum out for Easter Lunch. 
We are not sure what the rest of the month holds for us, or what we will be doing in the coming months. We will be making contact with organisations seeking a place for us to serve and trusting God to open the right door for us. If you have any suggestions as to where we could go from here, please get in touch!
Our current circumstances might be challenging but we have purposed ourselves to enjoy the journey and take every chance to laugh together and have fun! Every day we have a choice to allow the circumstances to get on top of us or for us to take the initiative and make the most of whatever comes our way!
We have been very blessed to have our friend’s house in Taunton to ourselves while they have been away and have also enjoyed having them home for the final 10 days of treatment. We were told to make a plan to stay closer to the hospital for the final 2 weeks of treatment as the consultant said Julie would not be able to travel very far or sit for long periods due to the pain. We had an offer to stay with Christians from a church in Bristol, who we didn’t know before and were so thankful for the offer of them opening their home to us. As Julie miraculously suffered very little side effects and has taken no regular pain medication, we decided to stay with our friends in Taunton right up to the end of treatment on 2nd March. 
When we sent out last month’s Newsletter we asked if anyone knew of somewhere we could rent for a few months for Julie’s recovery. Finding something affordable is not easy and we were really blessed when our friends who head up Joyce Meyer Ministries in Europe called us to say that one of their staff was a trustee for a Christian charity that owned a cottage in the Cotswolds for use by ministers on retreat. 
Surprisingly the cottage was not occupied during March and April and they said we could use it for 8 weeks for Julie to heal and regain her strength, paying only for the weekends to help them cover costs. We hope Julie will be OK to travel to Wales for Easter as we have to move out for a week due to the only prior booking the charity had. Having the opportunity to use this cottage is a real answer to prayer and we are so grateful! We will not have a landline or Wi-Fi for 2 months, but hopefully our mobile provider will give us some internet access. We are sure that we will figure out a way of keeping in touch and sending updates!
We got to Skype with the CFNI Missions Team in Dallas, who are doing a great job of ‘holding the fort’ in our absence! It was fun to see their smiling faces! We look forward to being back with them as soon as possible! 
Our hairdresser, knowing that Julie has to avoid infection, came to visit us at home to cut our hair. Julie’s hair was thinning after the chemotherapy drugs and Alison did a great job of making it look amazing again. We have never been so isolated from people, with only a few visitors in the past 8 weeks. 
We enjoyed catching up with Courtney for coffee and cake. She came from CFNI in 2014 to serve with us in Wellington and is still faithfully serving there for her second year. 
Our good friends Anne and Jack came home from Australia recently and we took them out for a meal to thank them for allowing us to stay at their house and looking after us so well in the last few weeks of treatment. We really appreciate the cards, flowers, phone calls, text messages and visits from good friends this month. It has made a real difference! With treatment now over, it’s time for the recovery process to begin. We are writing this from our cottage retreat in the Cotswolds. This is such a beautiful part of the country! The neighbours here are really helpful, putting the heating on and cleaning right through prior to us arriving. We are looking forward to being back to full strength and are ready to get on with all that God has in store for us next. Thank you for your love and support!
Coming to terms with the diagnosis and change of plans were part of the initial battle we faced, but sitting in a large, very full waiting room each day with patients of all ages suffering from all sorts of cancer waiting for treatment was something we hadn’t anticipated! It has however given us many opportunities to share part of our story and bring encouragement to patients and family members.
It’s given us the opportunity to pray for friends and family and spend more time reading the Bible and preparing for our future Missions Classes.
We take this opportunity early in the New Year to update you on some important unexpected changes to our immediate plans.
cream. When she was with the Doctor she mentioned that she had been having some symptoms in the past 3 months of what she thought might be Hemorrhoids, expecting to be given some medication to clear it up.
We made the most of the Christmas and New Year holidays and despite hospital appointments and challenging news to deal with, we were able to spend time with family and friends in Wales and Somerset.
Merry Christmas
We have been staying in a guest room in her sheltered housing complex. We wondered if this was training for later years! Â Thankfully Mum is now almost recovered and looking forward to spending Christmas with us, the children and grandchildren. It has been a bizarre build up with Christmas, with no home in the UK to store and wrap Christmas presents.
Having volunteered our time to teach and train students at CFNI for 3 months, a few highlights of our time in the US included celebrating the end of the semester with the 3rd Year Missions Major students and watching them receive their diplomas as they graduated, knowing we had played a significant part in getting them to this point and launching them on to the Mission Field.
We were recently invited to be guest speakers at our first Missions Conference in Southlake,