Thank you very much for your prayers for us and our ministry with Mission to the World. As director of MTW's Resource Team for Latin America, I have been focusing on ways to help us be good facilitators of church planting movements. Some of you know that I have written a book (unpublished) on this subject. (Covenant College has been using it as a text for its Theology of Missions course). The book is called "Toward a Theology of Movement" and aims to ground our missionary work in a Christ-centered, Kingdom oriented missiology. The book is 220 pages, but I also have a short version which is 26 pages of text plus appendix and bibliography sections totaling 10 pages. If you are interested in receiving a copy of this short version, let me know and I'll be glad to send you one.

The Resource Team has also developed seminars having to do with "Priority Systems"--that is, the ways in which our personal, organizational and cultural priorities are on the one hand reflections of God's glory, and on the other can become idolatrous to the extent that we depend on what we're good at instead of on Christ. This focus on priority systems has implications for many aspects of ministry, including team dynamics, partnerships, developing a philosophy of ministry, and the contextualization of the gospel in a way that does not compromise the gospel.

We also have written on such issues as preaching Christ cross-culturally (and there is a sense in which preaching Christ is always a cross-cultural event), how to avoid dependency, how the culture of the US affects missionary work, and leadership training.

If your church would be interested in having us speak on any of these issues, we would be glad to do so. Just let us know.

During the first week of August I was in Monterrey, Mexico, leading a seminar on how to train leadership in a way that will tend to facilitate a church planting movement. In attendance were both missionaries as well as Mexican leaders. It was my privilege to get to know our missionaries better and to meet some of the Mexican leadership.

Dave Strumbeck, a member of the Resource Team, was in Chile for about a month helping with the development of the leadership training program that has been established in that country. During the first week of September I will be attending a meeting of a committee of MTW that has been functioning over the last year. The task of this committee is to think through some of the issues involved in facilitating church planting movements. I would appreciate your prayers for this meeting.

Please pray for our financial support. We need about 500 dollars more a month than we have been receiving. Our support account is low, which means that MTW has not been able to reimburse some of our expenses (there are some specific expenses that MTW will reimburse only conditionally--that is, if the funds are available). Please pray that the Lord will supply this lack.

I have finished 42 credit hours (a little over a year) of the 65 hours required for the classroom phase of the doctoral program at George Washington University. It's a very heavy program. Please pray for me as I finish it. The courses are very interesting and have already proved to be helpful to my work with MTW, but sometimes I get tired of studying and wish I could be back ministering full time. Pray for the strength to carry on, and that I will be a good testimony to the faculty and other students.

This week Phyllis is finishing up her requirements for renewing her nursing license. She has finished the academic part and today is her first day of the "clinical" phase. That is, she is out there on the hospital floor working as a nurse, but under supervision. We decided she would go back to work in order to help pay for my education. Please pray for her today and this week. She's been out of nursing for over twenty years.

Thanks again for your support of us in our ministry.

Gary Waldecker