View this email in your browser I drove the long way home after breakfast up the Valley this morning. My path across our gorgeous Valley often finds me taking the indirect route these days. I all but groan in awe as the car or the bike carries me across the sinuous lines and rolling fields that are bordered on one side by blue-green Berry’s Mountain and on the other by Mahantonga Mountain. Even in early winter, the rectangled fields that are laid across these hills like a green-gold quilt over a sleeping body make driving straight through, from A to Z, a sad idea.  Glory like this requires gentle inspection and a curiosity that turns onto country lanes not yet explored. Just after first light, I meandered up the Valley towards Wednesday breakfast with Pastor Allan on Matterstown Road, the little-used string of asphalt that bisects the Valley, a mere mile and a near universe away from the highway that would have made quicker work of the journey from Millersburg to E’ville. (If you call it ‘Elizabethville’, you’re not from around here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) I choose the hour in order to appreciate the Amish children heading to one of the two Amish schools that I pass along the way. The children of neighbors closest to the school walk along the road in little family clusters. Those a little farther off travel in fleets of made-to-size Amish scooters. The children of one pair of families from just beyond scooter range crowds aboard a cart pulled by an eager little pony, who delivers his human cargo and then spends the day munching hay on the edge of the schoolyard. These are frequent fellow travelers of mine, responsive to a friendly wave, stewarding with their parents the same rich soil my ancestors farmed on these green, golden hills in this wide, windy, aromatic valley. One of our two ‘sending churches’, the Wethersfield (Connecticut) Evangelical Free Church, is learning to live sent in New England, a region of this country that for many decades has been resistant to vibrant Christian faith in spite of a history that saw some of its earliest European settlers aspiring to introduce heaven to earth. Karen and I are learning, too, to live sent. In our particular case, living sent means learning to love, live in, and give ourselves to multiple homes. It means living both here and there, as though each of these precious places in which our roots so naturally seek deepest penetration were the only place. The only home. Our only peeps. The only ‘ours’. It means belonging to more than one place that our Maker has given to us, hoping against all our frailty and self-centeredness that He has also given us to those same people and places. It is an intricate dance. I never know whether it can be understood apart from living it, so I seldom speak of it, rarely attempt to write it down, as now. I wouldn’t wish it casually on anyone, nor trade it for the world. Great-grandpa John Moses Bear and Grandpa James Baer In two weeks, Karen and I will make our next move toward one of those other places. As the next leg of our circuitous journey to Colombia, we’ll drive from Pennsylvania to North Carolina for two months of pre-field training at the Center for Intercultural Training. In the company of others who have been called to live across boundaries, we’ll learn skills as a couple that will help us navigate the cross-currents and surf the waves of our kind of living sent. Our United World Mission reckons soberly with the fact that cross-cultural ministry is a difficult thing, with challenges that put a megaphone to the garden-variety stresses of everyday life. People in this work are not infrequently chewed up and spat out. They go rogue and damage other human beings. So the policies of UWM wisely require of us this kind of rigorous training before we take our next steps towards Colombia. We’ll be trained via coursework in Equipping for Cross-Cultural Life and Ministry. Karen will do a segment on Second Language Acquisition. We hope to emerge with a toolbox for cross-cultural adaptation, prepared to thrive as a couple as we live sent in Colombia, Connecticut, and elsewhere. I also plan to become less pig-headed. Do the rhythms and demands of life make two months in western North Carolina feel like something we have time for? No. But this is risky business we’re putting our hand to. If this helps, bring it on. Just after family celebrations of Christmas and the New Year, we’ll leave for North Carolina from this magnificent, temporary respite-and-preparation haven barely 2.2 miles from the Pennsylvania home in which I grew up, two doors down from the church where the clarity and community of Jesus swept me into his embrace nearly five decades ago, a short walk from old farm houses whose addresses read ‘Hoy Road’, the name I first knew as my Grandma Baer’s maiden name. Our roots over these months have sunk with uninterrupted satisfaction into this rich, Pennsylvania German soil.  It has become, in the way that belies the old adage that you can’t go home again, well, home again. Better put in the light of our particular way of living sent, it’s one of the handful of places we call home. But we do not own it, cannot grasp it, must in the course of living sent hold such gifts lightly in our hands, must move suitcases and hearts to another place. Three places fill our hearts and minds at this stage of living sent. These images capture some aspect of each. Millersburg, Pennsylvania, our current transitional haven, from which our first sending church (David’s Community Bible Church) will send us to Colombia the first week of May. Wethersfield, Connecticut, home of our second sending church (Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church) and our home base for half of each year beginning in 2019. Medellín, Colombia, our home and place of service for half of each year, home of the magnificent ministry known as the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. We have reached 86% of our financial support goal! We’d love to reach 100% by December 31. Will you consider joining our team over these next few days? Click here to join our support team. This one thing I know (Well, two really …). When our Lord calls us to service in a particular place, he knits our hearts to it and to its people. Loving people and their place is not a zero-sum game. It is not necessary to love the people and place we have left any less in order to love the people and place to which we are going more. God’s love is expansive, not restrictive. So here’s how things roll in 2018-2019 (according to our plans, anyway): January-February 2018: We travel to North Carolina for pre-field training at the Center for Intercultural Training. March-April 2018: We return to Millersburg, Pennsylvania to conclude our support raising, to pack and prepare for the move to Colombia, and to be commissioned in separate services by David’s Community Bible Church (Millersburg, Pennsylvania) and Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church (Wethersfield, Connecticut). May 2018: We move to our new digs and work at the Biblical Seminary of Medellín (Colombia) during the first week of May. May-December 2018: We learn the ropes and make our first in-the-flesh contribution to the work of the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. January-June 2019: We give priority to developing the Theological Education Initiative from a home base (and, we hope, a purchased home) near Wethersfield, Connecticut. July-December 2019: We return to our apartment on the seminary campus in Colombia to dig in for our second annual round at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. 2018 will be slightly irregular, with the bulk of our time spent in Colombia. 2019 will represent the first regular version of the six-months-in-Colombia, six-months-in-Connecticut rhythm of work that we hope to maintain for the next ten or a dozen years. ¡Baers in Colombia, May 2018! Andrés Alemán is a graduate of the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. He and his marvelous wife Johana are planting and tending to a young church in a distressed community called Carambolas, high above the city center of Medellín on the Andean slopes that border Medellín proper on both sides. Don’t miss this excellent video glimpse of how the Presbyterian Church of Carambolas is serving its community! These are the kinds of people Karen and get to shape and serve. A forthcoming edition of Unfiltered will provide more concrete details about our work and calendar. Copyright © 2017 United World Mission, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because we believe you may want to stand with our work in Latin America and beyond. Our mailing address is: 739 Church Street, Millersburg, PA 17061 United World Mission is located at:  205 Regency Executive Park Dr Suite 430, Charlotte, NC 28217 800-825-5896 uwm.org Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Dear friends and family, It’s a brisk and beautiful Autumn day in central Pennsylvania. Days like this—’football weather‘, as my Dad used to call it—speak volumes about the change of seasons, gradual but inexorable. Winter will be upon us, then Springtime after that, then these suddenly cool, corn-bounded roads on which I bike in splendid solitude will once more become steamy hot.  It’s how things roll. Same with the changing seasons of Karen’s and my shared life. We are rolling with satisfaction, commitment, and joy towards Colombia, rich with new opportunities, challenges, and surprises.  Here is a catch-up summary, which the nip in the air tells me is slightly overdue: Karen is in Florida with four women from our church in Indianapolis with whom she gathers for three or four days every year, a life-giving sisterhood that I once upon a time accidentally named ‘The Turtle Club’. The name stuck. Tomorrow, Karen will fly back to Baltimore. I’ll meet her there and on Sunday we’ll fly down to our soon-future home at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia for an intense work week. Why a week in Colombia now? Over the last year, I’ve been investing 5-8 hours per week in a marvelous translation and adaptation project that will bring instruction in Biblical Hebrew online to Spanish speakers. It’s now time to push through a bottleneck by recording Spanish-Hebrew voiceovers, which I can best accomplish onsite at the Seminary. Karen will spend her days face-to-face with Magdalena, whom you may remember as Karen’s Skype-inhabiting Spanish language teacher. They’ll giggle, chuckle, and hug their way to greater mastery of elementary Spanish. They’re a little crazy, these two. The seminary has invited Karen and me to stay in the apartment that will become ‘ours’ when we move to Colombia in May, which will be fun and allow us to identify any changes, repairs, and furnishing that will turn this space into our home in about six months. We already get a kick out of overhearing our seminary colleagues refer to the space as el apartmento de los Baer ( = ‘the Baers’ apartment’). Our schedule has now shaped up rather firmly: (a) now to December: finish our support-raising marathon, moving from 83% to 100%; (b) January-February: pre-field training in North Carolina; (c) March-April; final speaking/convening assignments Stateside, prepare for move to Colombia; (d) first week of May: move to Medellín, Colombia! I’ve been keeping a fairly busy speaking and ministry schedule, mainly in connection with churches that in one way or another have become partners of us and of our work. The seminary dean has given me my first teaching assignments in Colombia for the year’s second semester of 2018 (July-December): (a) Biblical Theology and (b) Sacred Writings (the third section of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Old Testament’s ‘wisdom’ and ‘poetic’ sections are prevalent). It’s exciting to see how much good literature (sadly, most of it still translations) has become available in this field since I was last teaching full-time in Latin America, c. 2004. Karen is making strides in figuring out the stomach ailments that have plagued her in occasionally acute manner over the last year. Email is probably not the place to discuss this further. No, please, I really mean that. The huge Belgian plow horses at the Amish farm just down the road now hustle over to get their immense heads scratched when we walk by with Rhea. Our farms here in the Lykens Valley have had such a harvest of corn for silage this year that their silos are full to the brim and they’re storing the excess in gigantic white-plastic ‘worms’ on the ground. Their livestock will eat well this winter. But the price of milk is in the gutter, which is partly because Karen is making me drink almond milk. I bet you didn’t think I knew about this stuff. As part of my Theological Education Initiative responsibilities (the other half of my portfolio, of which the first half is anchored at the seminary in Colombia), I’ll teach an Old Testament course and make a general nuisance of myself in other ways once per year at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut, Lebanon. Karen and I will leverage that anchor in the calendar to develop TEI relationships with other seminaries in the Middle East and then probably do the same with one seminary in Latin America each year. My TEI colleague Dr. Daniel Salinas and I will coordinate to make sure we’re deepening and intelligently broadening our TEI network in ways that more or less cover the globe. That last clause sounded a little more pompous than it was supposed to. Overseas Council, which I directed from 2004-2016 has just announced that they’re being acquired by our own United World Mission and will function under the ‘OC’ name as a division of United World Mission. Life is peculiar, inscrutable, and quite often beautiful. We are now at 83% of the full funding required for us to launch. May I ask you to consider becoming part of the final 17%? Email me if this is for you. Or if I got the math wrong. If you’re a Strava user and would like us to track with each other’s fitness routes, let me know. If this means nothing to you, don’t feel left out but please do move quickly to the next bullet point before you are overtaken by foolish ideas. I’ve nearly finished taking the 15-week online Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course and am hearing positive sounds from the Perspectives organization about my proposal that I offer the course online to a small number of highly motivated influencers in the seven churches to which we principally relate. If you want to know more about this absolutely stupendous learning opportunity, shoot me an email. I’m not kidding, it will change everything you thought you knew about ‘missions’. Things we’ll do around the margins of our Colombia work next week: √ one: locate the best places to ride in and around Medellín √ two: find a reputable and welcoming bike shop √ three: pour over a map of Medellín with colleagues to get our bearings √ four: locate and check out a big-box DIY (think Home Depot, Lowes, Menards) to price stuff we’ll need for our apartment; ditto on a furniture store √ five: check out the nearest gym and figure out what hours a person can safely run to it from the challenged neighborhood in which the seminary is located √ six: enjoy dinners with future colleagues and students √ seven: suck the high Andean evening air into our lungs and wonder about the surprises God has in store for us over these next 11 years. Here’s an addition to that last list: √ eight: laugh a lot. A few days ago a long-time friend who taught for some years at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia wrote this unsolicited description of the seminary community: ‘There’s a marketing slogan at the seminary – Una vivencia única (“a unique way of living”)- and it is all of that and much more … That place is special in so many ways.  There’s a word in Spanish “acogedor” which really sums it nicely.  But it is also intergenerational  and a great mentoring environment.’ Karen and I  don’t live chasing utopias, which always disappoint with a loud crashing sound anyway. But the seminary is at a beautiful place on its own organizational cycle, and we feel so privileged to be putting our skinny little shoulders to the plough in that place with these people at this unique moment. Here’s what Karen would say if she were not with the Turtle Club Ladies in Florida right now: ‘Ask them to pray that my Spanish will take a leap forward and that we’ll make progress on managing a health-diet-and-medical regimen that will empower me to serve from strength in Colombia.’ I think. Even if I didn’t get that exactly right, please do pray for us as we travel and serve and prepare and travel and serve. And prepare. Go, Astros! We love youse guys. Warmly, David (for Karen, too) Copyright © 2017 United World Mission, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because we believe you may want to stand with our work in Latin America and beyond. Our mailing address is: 739 Church Street, Millersburg, PA 17061 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.