Welcome to the first edition of MI link. This replaces the excellent Bulletin, which Jay Matenga collated and edited so well for so long.  Our aim with the link  is a different style of communication, bringing stories, testimonies and articles highlighting what God is doing in mission relevant to Aotearoa. We hope to include new and fresh stories from the Aotearoa mission community, as well as links to articles and/or videos which are already published on the internet. 

We hope to have a theme each month. This month's issue has a theme of Digital Technology in missions.   Please send us any suggestions for a theme!

Last month we welcomed Ben Poulton to the Administrator role for MI and we are delighted that he is ably picking up his responsibilities. The Missions Interlink Executive is currently working on a role description for the new Director, which will be advertised shortly. There is already interest in the position. 

There’s been a lot happening in Missions Interlink over the last few months. The Executive Council is working on a refreshed document summarising our vision, values, purpose and functions as we refresh and prepare to continue advancing as a mission community. This reworking came after three stakeholder gatherings, in November last year and February and May this year. It was encouraging to see that there was still enthusiasm for our ministry.

These discussions were in part due to a looming financial crisis. While not in a crisis, we could see the dark clouds gathering ahead. We are thankful that due to several very generous gifts, the clouds are a little further towards the horizon than they were, but financial challenge is one area that the MI Council and especially the Executive Council will need to address going forward.

As this is the first edition of the link, we would love your feedback. How can we best keep the mission community linked?

Yours in Christ,

Joseph Bateson

Chair of Missions Interlink

(Interim Director)

Recently, the Lausanne Movement asked me to create a “virtual lounge” for the 5000 online participants who will be joining the 5000 IRL (in real life) participants in Seoul at the Fourth Lausanne Congress. Lausanne is a movement started by Billy Graham and John Stott in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974. They host a large gathering of mission leaders every 15 years or so. This 2024 event in Seoul in September is an important one, marking 50 years since their beginning, and has been prefaced by a recent publication called “The State of the Great Commission”. This report outlines the current challenge of world mission before us and highlights the recent emphasis on digital missions and digital communities inside Web3.

On the left: Lausanne meeting room, Seoul.  On the right: Lausanne Virtual Rooftop Lounge. 

“TallSkinnyKiwi” Andrew Jones is seeking a new missions organisation to send him back overseas.   

 tallskinnykiwi@gmail.com

Pioneering Kiwis tend to have this much-needed quality of noticing when something’s not quite right and then the attitude to ask, “Well, why not?”. Often this leads them to embark on a process to solve the problem that no one else seems to have noticed. If nothing else, the WHY question forces others around us to pause and think about whether there's a better way to do what we’re doing. This can be a wonderful gift to the world of Bible translation.

Unicode - a globally accepted standard for encoding every written script on the planet - was introduced. This was welcome news, but what about all the scriptures that had already been keyed in with pre-Unicode fonts? Everyone was being told that these materials would have to be re-keyed into the computer to be in the right Unicode-compliant format. Why? Because there wasn’t a solution available to transfer their data from one standard to another. Well, why not? Because no one has needed it before! Well, then, why don’t we build the bridge? And so it was. I worked alongside a far more gifted programmer colleague to build an Encoding Converter which would do exactly that - take old legacy data and transform it into new Unicode data saving people from having to retype it, and re-proofread the contents. Thousands of hours of work were saved, and that tool is now embedded inside all sorts of other software that we use. For example, if you need to publish the same scripture in more than one script, you can call that software to do it for you - it converts an entire Bible in a matter of seconds.