Hello friends,

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   We're writing this from our porch in Salatiga, where the evening rain has just let up and the call to prayer from the mosque down the road is mixing with the sound of Eli chasing a chicken across the yard (don't worry, it's not ours — it wandered in again). It's hard to believe another quarter has slipped by, but here we are, and we wanted to catch you up on what God's been doing in our little corner of Central Java.

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  Back in January, Mark started a year-long training cohort for twelve young Javanese pastors and church planters from villages scattered around Salatiga and up toward the slopes of Mount Merbabu. This quarter, we wrapped it up — and honestly, it was one of the most encouraging seasons we've had since arriving in 2019. Watching these guys grow from nervous, note-taking students into men who now argue theology with us has been one of the great joys of this assignment. Three of them have already started small congregations in villages that had no evangelical presence before. One, a former motorcycle mechanic named Yusuf, preached his first sermon to a room of nine people in his mother's front room. By the end of the quarter, that room had grown to over thirty, and they've had to start meeting outside. We celebrated the end of the cohort with a big meal — goat satay, of course — and a lot of laughing about how badly Mark still mangles certain Javanese vowel sounds. He's getting better. Slowly.

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  Rachel's maternal health and literacy initiative, which pairs basic prenatal care education with reading classes for women in three rural villages, crossed a quiet but meaningful threshold this quarter: one hundred women have now completed the full program since it started two years ago. What's been most moving isn't the number, though — it's watching some of the earliest graduates come back as volunteer teachers themselves. A woman named Ibu Sri, who couldn't read when she joined the program in its first cohort, now leads a weekly literacy circle in her own village. She told Rachel, through tears, that the first thing she ever read on her own was a letter from her son at university. That's the kind of moment that makes the mosquito bites and long motorbike rides on rutted roads feel entirely worth it.

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   On the home front — the kids are growing up bilingual and slightly feral, in the best way. Josiah, now twelve, has started playing on a local futsal team and has picked up enough slang that he's started correcting our Indonesian, which is humbling. Naomi has become the neighborhood's unofficial cat rescuer; we are currently hosting two kittens "temporarily." Eli, our five-year-old, still can't quite decide if he's more Indonesian or American — he asks for nasi goreng for breakfast and complains when we don't have peanut butter in the house, all in the same sentence. School has been a good rhythm for them this quarter, and we're grateful for the small community of missionary and expat families who've become like extended family here. There's something sacred about the potlucks, the shared homeschool co-op days, and the WhatsApp group that lights up at 2am when someone's kid has a fever and needs a doctor recommendation.

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‍Prayer and Thanks

A few specific things we'd treasure your prayers for as we head into the next quarter:

• Continued fruit from the cohort — pray for Yusuf and the other new church planters as they navigate leading congregations for the first time, often while still working day jobs.
• Funding for a second health program site — we're hoping to expand Rachel's program to a fourth village next year, but it depends on additional support.
• Rest — if we're honest, this has been a full season, and we're feeling it. Pray for our marriage, our own walk with God, and margin for our family amid the busyness of ministry.

And thank you — truly. Your prayers and support are not background noise to us; they're the reason any of this is possible. We don't take for granted that people on the other side of the world think of our family and this work.

More soon. Until then, sampai jumpa lagi — until we meet again.

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With love from Java,

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Mark, Rachel, Josiah, Naomi & Eli

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