Today was a busy but rewarding day. Mr Pandian (Sharmilla’s father) kindly arranged for me to meet some very experienced Tamil Pastors and then to be taken out to see some Lutheran churches in villages way out of Chennai. This was one of those experiences which is what my sabbatical is all about. It was […]

August 22nd is Madras day – celebrating the founding of the city (now known as Chennai) in 1639, when the Englishman (this was before Great Britain) Francis Day along with his superior Andrew Cogan struck a deal with the Vijayanagar empire to acquire a stretch of no man’s land, on which to build a fort […]

In 1978 Prof S. Paneer Selvam (Jabez’s father = the father-in-law of Sharmilla’s sister) had the amazing vision to start Indian Bible Translators. He was struck that, although he could speak English fluently, he was only fully comfortable reading a Tamil Bible. He became convinced that every person had a right to worship God in […]

When we lived in Sydney we loved to drive west out on the M4 for about an hour to the Blue Mountains – so named because of the blue haze created by the gum trees. This weekend I have been travelling around the Nilgiri hills in western Tamil Nadu (almost into Kerala). You can imagine […]

This morning I had the privilege of preaching at St. Stephen’s Ootacamund(Ooty) Church of South India. Two things about the photo – yes, I am wearing a tie; no, there were more than 3 people in the church (there were about 150 there but the photo doesn’t show that.) The Parish Priest and his wife […]

While staying in Chennai my kind hosts are Jabez and Grace (Sharmilla’s sister). Today I flew with Jabez to Coimbatore where he grew up and where his father started IBT (Indian Bible Translators). From there we drove up into the hill country to Ooty where he showed me several IBT ministries. One highlight was a […]

Today Lopez was my guide – Lopez is the brother of Pastor Thomas Francis who showed us around Dubai. He kindly drove me around the city showing me the sights and helping me get my bearings. Chennai is a great, bustling city. We went to the famous Marina beach and the historic Fort area. A […]

We have become quite adept at using the trains in Sri Lanka. We were feeling very pleased with ourselves as we booked our 2nd class tickets for the 100km trip from Hikkaduwa to Mount Lavinia – tickets only cost 160 rupees each (about 90p) even though we splashed out on 2nd class in the hope […]

How do you find a local church to attend when on holiday? Well John googled ‘evangelical churches in Hikkaduwa’ and could only find one – Calvary Free Church. According to one unoffical FB page we could see the location of the church on the map but no reference to service times or what language the […]

I’m not sure what you call a holiday when it feels like you are on holiday already, but we planned a few days together as a family to round off our trip. (On Monday we return to Colombo in order to see some more ministry, pack up, and fly out next Thursday.) So it all […]