News Update, January 2007

Dear friends,

Greetings from Mallorca! And Happy New Year! Just to make you envious, the temperature is back to the same 20º maximum we had most of the autumn, after just 3 weeks of rain – which brought more water than the rest of the year put together. We have now been here for ten months and are feeling relatively settled. But life is very different here to anything we have known either in central Spain or Switzerland.

Hilde is busy with the Catalan course which began in October. It will finish in mid-February. She is making excellent progress, although in a rather unorthodox way. The classes are actually for Mallorquin people who weren't allowed to study their own language at school during the dictatorship, so they are working hard on grammar, spelling and so on, but she has to understand the teacher speaking at full tilt and using all kinds of complex constructions. We attempt to catch up with two editions on Teach Yourself Catalan!

The church in Palma which we attend is not currently reaching out to the Mallorquin people. This is not really a lack of interest, but of priority. The church building now seats 480 on a Sunday morning and every seat is full, mostly with Latin Americans. So the need is to accommodate Spanish speakers from different cultures, rather than local Catalan speakers. However, here in the village, if you don't speak Catalan you need to speak German, then English before Spanish! (I joke, but there are lots of northern Europeans here.) In fact, we are working on a project to do an Alpha course in Lent for the English community. It will be led by a lady from the chaplaincy church in Palma who has done the Alpha leadership course. We have also visited several other Spanish speaking churches, but have not yet developed any local ministry opportunities with them.

National activity has also been on the back burner this year, but there are two projects currently in the pipeline. Firstly, we hope to fit in supporting a campaign at Easter in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), led by our friends Ken and Alison Barrett. Also, the Evangelists' Conference has a project to produce a free distribution magazine (funds permitting) which we will be able to place in such places as doctors' waiting rooms. At the time of writing there are still few recruits for Easter. If you are interested, let us know!

Most of the time, meanwhile, is taken up with web ministry, presenting the news and prayer requests from Spain, as well as from OAC around the world. In addition I helped the local church to redo their web site.

At the start of a new year we want to thank you for your support in prayer. What would we do without it? Life is usually fairly plain sailing, but from time to time one comes up against a succession of events which remind us of our reliance on the Lord. Writing the first draft of this letter -before Christmas- a run of events came against us. Firstly the transformer on the ADSL modem died, so I switched to the mobile Vodafone card, but that produced problems and needed to be reinstalled and other elements of the system uninstalled. The printer, meanwhile decided not to work, although when I had time to look it turned out to be a loose cable. And out for the evening my parents' car got a puncture, so we missed seeing 'The Queen'. Roll on the DVD release date? And meanwhile I have some sinusitis which just won't go away. At least we took comfort from the thought that one can live for a few days without technology.

May your 2007 be full of blessings.

Lots of love from us both,

Chris & Hilde