Robinson ministry update - February 2024

Tim Robinson

Expanding our Reach: Robinson Ministry update - Feb 2024

Greetings from Lancaster, UK!

It has felt like quite a busy start to the year.

Tim has thrown himself into his new job. A lot of zoom calls with various members of his team and other folks serving on country teams. At this point Tim is mostly doing a lot of listening and absorbing how things work in this area of the world. There are some key positions on his team that are currently vacant. This means extra learning about those areas so he can do what he can to help until they are filled.

Tim had some really helpful meetings last week in mainland Europe. It was a chance to meet his new team and participate in some key discussions. The few times he felt he was able to make a contribution it was well received and he was able to feel like he was starting to get his head around things. An unexpected benefit of these meetings was that he was also able to meet some of our key resourcing partner organisations, getting to know them and their desire for involvement in various aspects of what we do.

At the end of next week Tim will travel to East Africa for meetings with the Innovation team exploring topics like, how do we make space for experiments and innovation? How do we raise funds for trying as yet unproved things? This will be the 4th time Tim has been to this conference, he is only 1 of 3 people to have done so!

The Language Data Sharpening Initiative that I (Ali) have been working on for most of the past year has been progressing nicely. We were able to submit the first batch of language data for funding and that funding has now been sent through and will be going out to all the hard-working groups who collected the data. We had data submitted for 117 languages, representing hundreds of thousands of people. Praise God that we now have more accurate information about these languages, their use, and the scripture translation needs of the people who speak them.

There are still a lot of languages for which data is being collected, please pray that that process will go well. It often requires travel to out of the way places and sometimes conversations via an interpreter, and lots of wisdom is required to analyse what is being said.

We enjoyed having Dan around for his Christmas break, maybe a shorter time than expected, as he had his first set of UK Uni exams in early January. He hasn’t had his results back yet but he felt like they went well. He was a bit concerned beforehand that he might run out of time. In the end he found that he only did on one of them and it seemed like that was a fairly common experience among the students for that particular exam. Otherwise he is keeping well and continues to enjoy life in Newcastle.

We really appreciate and need your prayers.

Praise

• Tim had an encouraging and beneficial time connecting with his new team
• Dan’s first experience of UK University exams was positive
• Funding has come through for all the language data submitted so far

Prayer

• Preparations for Tim’s next trip which is to East Africa for an Innovation conference
• For those who are still gathering language data all across the world
• Our income continues to be short of our monthly target
• That the key positions on Tim’s team will be filled with the right people

God bless!
Tim & Ali & Dan Robinson.