What follows is a three-stranded interweaving of my Ministry Manifesto, the Legacy of Viktor Poloha, and the quiet calling of the Savior on each of our lives.
I am the only one in my family that is not a citizen of the Slovak Republic. Jana has Slovak citizenship because she was born in Slovakia and thanks to her so do Elisabeth and Max. All of them also have US citizenships. Jana became a citizen of the United States just a few weeks after Elisabeth was born and since Slovakia recognizes dual citizenship she did not lose her Slovak citizenship by becoming a citizen of the United States. So far this has been very nice.
We took our first family vacation in a long time during spring break, enjoying a week with grandma Terry in Phoenix, AZ. Perhaps the highlights of the trip included our encounters with creation.
I guess this is kind of a throw away post. I could have also titled it, “How to Drive (Unwanted) Traffic to Your Site” or “Weird Things People Search For.”
On March 6-7 I had the opportunity to preach at First Evangelical Free Church in Rockford, IL for the spring missions conference. The title of the sermon is “In the Mi(d)st of Reality” and is from Isaiah 46 (same as in Davis a few weeks ago). I was able to get an audio file from Rockford and have embedded the sermon presentation with the sermon audio above. You can also right click on this sermon link and select “save link as…” to download just the audio (mp3) file. Continue reading for more on why I think preaching is to teaching as poetry is to prose.
This has had implications for the seminary in Banská Bystrica (KETM). As I was looking for Slovakia news to post through our twitter account (see our events page) I ran into an article in the Naperville Sun about a delegation from Nitra, Slovakia that recently visited Naperville, IL. Nitra and Naperville are sister cities and this year a delegation from Slovakia visited Nitra to share ideas and resources in areas such as religion, higher education, and public safety.
From the Bannockburn Gazette… “Todd and Jana Patterson, missionaries to Slovakia, visited the Growing in Grace Sunday School class at the Evangelical Free Church of Naperville on Sunday, October 4th. Todd finished a five week series on the book of Genesis and the class hosted the missionaries along with their two beautiful children, Elisabeth (7) and Max (5), for a pot-luck dinner. Afterwards John and Lois Rabb invited them for an afternoon of conversation … and a good time was had by all.”
Another big, big milestone today. This afternoon I had my proposal hearing with my committee (Drs. Averbeck, Younger and VanGemeren). They accepted my proposal as is, which means I now qualify for PhD candidacy and am “all but dissertation,” or ABD–as they say. |   |
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For several months now I’ve been reading about uncertainty in the University system in Slovakia. New laws have been redefining requirements and schools have been scurrying to meet these new requirements in order to preserve their status as a “University” instead of merely an “Institution of Higher Education.”
