Marty Sweeney / 9th January 2007
/ All around the world...
ESPN reports the “jaw-dropper” story of the year in the tennis world:
Former teen sensation and world No. 2 Andrea Jaeger entered a convent to begin her apprenticeship as a Dominican nun in the Episcopal Church. Jaeger, long lauded for her charitable work for children, admitted in several interviews that she tanked important matches because she was conflicted about winning and hurting her opponents.
I completely agree with the writers at ESPN as to why this story captured its “jaw-dropping” title; I too had no idea that there were Dominican nuns in the Episcopal Church.
Ian Carmichael / 1st January 2007
Happy new year to all our readers and fellow-workers in the gospel.
I thought it might be a good thing for us to start the year off by saying how much we appreciate your prayers. In some ways we tend to neglect to communicate about our desire for your prayers for our ministry. In normal Christian ministry the request for prayers generally goes along with requests for financial support. But since Matthias Media seeks to be a self-funding ministry (funding our work out of sales of resources), we also tend to end up not mentioning our need for your prayers.
That really should not be the case. We'd love you to pray for us during 2007, and our new year's resolution is to try to do better at mentioning specific prayer matters throughout the year.
As we begin the year, we are conscious of several areas...
- please pray for faithfulness for all our staff in whatever roles they have, but particularly for faithfulness (by authors and editors) in teaching God's word through the resources;
- pray for growth in sales in 2007, which not only means there is more ministry being done with our resources, but also means we have more funds to invest in developing new resources;
- pray for growth in North America, through our new Pennsylvania office, and for our Ministry Director in the USA, Marty Sweeney;
- pray particularly for the impact of evangelistic resources, that many would come into the Kingdom through reading/studying them;
- pray for Tony Payne and Ian Carmichael, as they lead the MM team, which will undergo some more changes in 2007 (with a graphic designer beginning in January, and an operations and logistics manager in March; pray for Glendon Mar as he leaves MM and takes up a position with the Bible League in January.)
Thanks again for your support and partnership.
