How to visit your missionary
For the past two years, since stepping down as Senior Pastor of Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh, Peter Grainger, along with his wife, has been ‘pastor at large’, visiting some of the Chapel’s 40-strong missionary family — in North Africa, India, Bolivia, Romania, Malawi and the UK.
It took eight months from leaving Britain in March 1871 for journalist Henry Stanley to reach the town of Ujiji near Lake Tangyanika and to utter the immortal words, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ on meeting the famous missionary. It took my wife and me 18 hours to reach the city of Blantyre (named after Livingstone’s Scottish birthplace) in Malawi to meet our missionaries, David and Kirsty Kanyumi, serving at the Evangelical Bible College of Malawi.
Lost sheep
A cartoon-caption competition in the American Christian journal Leadership featured a spectacle-wearing sheep speaking from behind a pulpit. In my favourite among the ten listed winners, the sheep is saying, 'I want to thank all 99 of you for giving Pastor Bob the freedom to seek me out'.
The well-known parable of the lost sheep, as recorded in Luke's Gospel, contains a rhetorical question: 'Then Jesus told them this parable: "Suppose one of you has a 100 sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the 99 in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?"'