This cute little boy is Igor.  He wasn’t always so cheerful.  During the Serbian war, Igor and his family had to flee their home, and ended up with hundreds of others sleeping rough in a half-complete school building which became an ad hoc refugee camp.  Traumatised by the event, he withdrew, and became known throughout the camp as the child who never smiled.

Some while later, some Christians from Belgrade Bible School began a regular ministry to the refugees.  They built up relationships and helped whoever they could.  One day they asked Igor’s parents if they could take him on a children’s camp they were organising, along with his brothers and sisters and other children from the refugee camp.  His parents agreed.

When the children came back, people didn’t recognise Igor.  They thought he looked familiar, but they didn’t know him.  Only after a few days did somebody work out what the difference was – his cheeky grin!  When they asked him why he smiled so much, he told them that he’d met Jesus.

Belgrade Bible School has hundreds of similar stories of what God has done in the lives of Serbian people.  Since its beginning in 1996 amid the death throes of Yugoslavia, it has sent out church planters and evangelists all over Serbia.  They have endured much hardship and struggle, but the gospel is prevailing.  Please pray for them.  Supported by Oak Hall, the well-known organiser of Christian expeditions, the bible college is under Serbian leadership and continues to grow and develop.

Read more about Belgrade Bible College: http://www.oakhall.org.uk/

Visit the Bible College with Oak Hall: http://www.oakhall.co.uk/pages/summer10serbiaatom.asp

Many tired missionaries working in East Asia are delighted to have discovered Bethany.  This is a rest and retreat complex on Cheung Chau Island off Hong Kong. It is specifically funded and staffed to offer member care to those working cross-culturally in Asia and beyond offering good quality, inexpensive accommodation. Bethany is set in gardens of trees and flowers on the quiet, traffic free island of Cheung Chau with good beaches and scenic walks, so is an ideal place to relax and recuperate from a demanding ministry.

Despite feeling remote, it is conveniently accessible from Hong Kong, so it’s not hard to get to despite feeling away from it all.  Set on a hill in attractive grounds overlooking the South China Sea, Bethany’s location is idyllic – five minutes to sandy beaches, peaceful walks around rocky coves and yet the town with its restaurants and shops is just nearby. The Bethany team includes those who have understanding and long experience of the demands on people, for example adjusting to new cultures, difficulties with co-workers, frustrations with sponsors, parenting and educational decision-making, family and marriage needs cross-culturally.

The Bethany mission is to keep people resilient, working in their God-given field for longer. At a basic level, they provide a home from home with familiar food, language and culture allowing people to recover in holiday mode from tiredness and stress. In association with this they have experienced pastoral couples available for prayer and with a listening and sympathetic ear.

More information is available on the Bethany website: www.bethanyministries.com

Tech Notes is a series of updates by Syzygy’s resident technical expert Adam Brown, which we hope will be of use to all those struggling to get the best out of their computers, gadgets and phone.  The first one is on speeding up your computer:

One of the most asked questions is how to speed up your computer or how to fix a slow PC, and we all want to get the maximum speeds possible with our hardware and software configurations.  There are many causes for your PC running slow and these can include software and hardware issues. Some of the most common reasons are:

- You have the High Performance Options set on Windows, which uses a lot of memory, but it’s not worth it just to look good

- You’re running out of disk space

- Your computer needs a serious clean up and perhaps a fresh installation

Software methods for speeding up your Computer:

1) Remove Auto Startup Programs – Have a look at your start menu and see which programs have been set to start up on boot up. This can dramatically slow down the loading of your operating system and can be very frustrating when you just want to jump on your computer and get something done quickly. Avoid programs that ask for automatic startup and sign-in. This is the main reason for PC slow start.

Click on Start –> All Programs –> Startup

Then delete anything in this folder that you don’t use or recognise.  There is a more ‘geeky’ way to do this, but I will cover that at a later date!

2) Clean up Disk Space – Try freeing up some room on your hard-drive; a hard drive that’s full of files will not run at maximum speeds. Try doing a disk cleanup to remove any unneeded files or unused desktop icons, temporary Internet files and things like that.

Click on Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Click on Disk Cleanup

3) Defragment your Hard drive – It’s a good idea to defragment your hard drive every 3-6 months or so, to make sure all your files are nicely ordered and that each hard drive sector is behaving as it should. Files can get out of hand sometimes and this helps to keep them under control. Defragmentation is also designed to help speed up access of hard drive files.

Click on Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –>Click on Disk Defragmenter

4) Change Performance Options on Windows – This can make a lot of difference, now with these new operating systems so caught up on looking sleek and smooth they sometimes seriously neglect performance. For example even XP and Vista can run slow on some machines with full graphics and everything setup. To modify your windows graphics and set it to a lower level follow these steps:

Right click on My Computer –> Click Properties –> Click Advanced–> under Performance Click Settings

Here you can manually select what you want windows to look like or click “adjust for best performance”.  It’s amazing how well this can fix a slow PC.

5) Increase Physical / Virtual Memory – You can also choose to increase your virtual/physical memory, this memory is simply spare space on your hard drive windows uses just as it would use spare memory/RAM.

Right click on My Computer –> Click Properties –> Click Advanced–> Click Advanced tab –>Under Virtual Memory click Change

Here you can select a custom size and then hit set, otherwise you can just use system-managed size.

Next month: more advanced solutions for dealing with slow PCs

For Your Information is an occasional series of reports informing missionaries abroad of the current state of the church in the UK.  Today we consider the on/off relationship between All Nations and Redcliffe.

Friends and family of ‘Just Good Friends’ couple Redcliffe and All Nations who have been out buying new hats will be disappointed to hear of another hitch in the turbulent  relationship between these star-crossed lovers.

They will remember how many years ago the couple nearly made it up the aisle before realising that they weren’t ready for everlasting commitment.  Last year the pair, who have remained on amicable terms ever since, delighted their many wellwishers with the news that once again they were engaged.  Yet despite many late-night heart-to-hearts, it seems that the course of true love is determined not to run smooth.

The unhappy couple, who clearly continue to be on good terms but whose compatibility is questionable, are believed to have been unable to resolve many differences, the chief of which was an inability to agree on where to set up the conjugal home.  Both have attractive properties, one in fashionable central Gloucester, and the other in delightful rural Hertfordshire, but clearly could not afford to maintain both properties.  Despite their evident desire to move in together, neither was willing to leave their home of many years.

So the posh frocks are going back in the wardrobe, at least for a few years.  It seems that the clock is ticking for the ageing singletons  who are reluctant to surrender their independence for domestic bliss – but are there any other potential suitors out there?  Apparently not.  Could they be dooming themselves to lifelong loneliness?

For never was a story of more tragedie

Than this of Redcliffe and of ANCC

A friend of mine recently suggested that we should use missionarysavingexpert.com as our web address.  Not a bad idea: it’s witty, nobody else is using it, and it does what it says on the tin.

That’s what we’re about.  Good member care can mean the difference between missionaries continuing being effective in their calling for years, or giving up and going home.  We’re resolved to do all we can to prevent them doing the latter.  Our three stage strategy is:

1) where we find missionaries who have critical needs, use our network of contacts to try and meet them;

2) work together with their churches and sending organisations to try and help them develop a vision and strategy for meeting those needs themselves;

3) work within the missions community to help raise standards of member care across the sector.

And in the longer term, we’re hoping to build this website into a complete web-based resource for providing people in the field with tools to do the job, so keep coming back for updates and new pages.

In recent weeks I’ve talked to a lot of people who are really excited about what we’re doing.  We’ve got a growing number of Facebook fans.  I’ve received a lot of positive response to our new website.  But mainly not from the people we’re aiming to help – struggling missionaries.

That’s why we need your help.  If you know any missionaries, please send them a link to this site.  If you know anyone who is active in the world of overseas missions, let them know about us.  The more people who know, the more chance we have of finding the people we’re here to serve.

And then maybe we really can be missionarysavingexpert.com!