Hello friends, I just wanted to let you know that our public giving site, which has been located at www.mtw.org/bean since joining MTW staff a few years ago, is going to be “anonymised” sometime in the next few days (we’re not sure when exactly), with the removal of our family picture, names, and any personally identifiable details. But don’t panic, it’s not because we are leaving MTW or the mission field. We will be traveling to visit a team in a Muslim majority country in late March to encourage them and learn from them in hopes of becoming better equipped to reach our friends and neighbours from the Islamic world.
While we can't tell you the name of the city or country we'll be visiting, we can tell you a little bit about it. We can tell you that it is statistically "97-99%" muslim, and that the majority of Muslims there are Shia, with a large minority who are Sunni Muslims. With the exception of westerners who have moved there to do business in their growing economy, over 96% of its citizens are are members of Unreached People Groups and the number of Bible believing Christians in the country is only about 0.2% of the population. The good news is that Christianity is slowly growing there at a modest growth rate of just less than 4% per year, and they border another Muslim majority country where Christianity is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. (For comparison, Christianity's global annual growth rate for all countries is 2.6%, in the U.S. it is 0.8%, and the U.K. is 0.0%)
For security reasons, in order to keep the team we're visiting and the folks they are reaching in their host country safe, we can’t really say much more than that right now, and that is why our giving site will be changed soon in case any government officials or others may do a web search on us as part of our visa application, or other interactions that may happen while we’re in country. We’re also in the process of trying to remove anything from our social media that may be publicly accessible with a web search that would associate us with the organisation that we and the team we are visiting work for, including our Facebook group, which I have now changed the settings for to private and hidden except for people who are already members of the group.
We would be encouraged to have your prayers for this trip, both for us and for the team we will be visiting, and if you may feel led to give toward our travel expenses to learn from our colleagues there, we would be so grateful. For now you can still give online at our www.mtw.org/bean website, but we hope to have a new secure link soon that will be considerably more “bare bones” that may have not have any more information on it than our personal MTW ministry account number (400513).
Finally, if any of you tech gurus out there want to “snoop” for us with a search and let us know if find anything out there on the “World Wide Web” that we need to shut down, including mentions of us on church websites, newsletters posted online, etc. that could be helpful as well!
