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August 23, 2004Attention: Joel Hogan

It’s been a while since the 1992 short-term summer mission,

and now it seems a while since I made the movie “Phillipines

for Christ!”, but the Spirit makes it a present reality.

You see we become connected to fellow brothers and sisters in

Christ through the Spirit by our interactions in the Spirit

during the mission.

And that is what bothers me about the CRC Summer

Missions—the lack of follow up to the initial “revivals.”

I sort of feel like I was “used” as an actor for the permanent

missionaries amusement to a certain extent. Without the names

and addresses of the persons we met—or at least some of the

persons who helped organize the gatherings, I feel sort of

amputated. I can’t communicate with anybody. I have pictures

and memories but no, or few, names and addresses.

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A few of the kids from WYAM wrote to me shortly after the

mission but their addresses were apparently temporary. You

are back in the United States now. Joe Boeve finally made

contact by e-mail, but he’s been a little antagonistic towards

me because he perceives me as a “liberal”. He may be wrong.

Of course, some liberals, on the other hand, may misperceive

me as a “conservative. The truth is, I am in Christ.

Anyways, I just spent fifty or so days on the road doing a Holy

Spirit revival of sorts and now I am doing follow up—

connectedness—because I have names and addresses. Isn’t

there a mailing list for some of the people we reached in the

Philippines? I don’t even have the names or addresses of some

of the CRC kids who we traveled with for three months.

About a year ago the Superior Court of Los Angeles County

initiated a “court-clergy conference” at Fuller Seminary which

I attended. They said they were intent on making this an

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annual gathering but there has been no indication that they

have done anything further. They even said there would be a

mailing list of attendees provided but they didn’t do that

either. The people with the mailing list control the

connectedness and ability to communicate to a certain extent.

It’s not fair to control people by controlling with whom we can

communicate by making the addresses of people privy only to a

few. Open up the channels to the availability of the Holy Spirit.

Let us all participate. And in some cases you have missionaries

with little or even much less education than some of the

participants in the short-term missions and yet these

missionaries remain in more powerful positions than those

with the education and sometimes more zeal.

Let us all participate, and don’t use us for your own self-

serving purposes.