LETTER FROM KATIE • February 4, 2026

Sawai Chinnawong (Thai, 1959–), Genesis 9:13, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 27 × 27 in.

Dear Holy Comforter,

It was such a joy to be back with you in person last Sunday for our kid-led Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. What a gift it was to see our children leading us in worship—reading scripture, offering prayers, joining the procession, serving communion. Their joy and confidence were a beautiful reminder that God is alive and at work among us.

This coming Sunday, we’ll celebrate World Mission Sunday and Galen Carey will be our preacher. I’m especially grateful for the chance to hear from Galen and to be reminded that we are both the recipients of others’ faithful witness and participants in God’s ongoing mission. We are invited not only to receive God’s love, but to share it—to welcome others into the life, healing, and hope we ourselves have found.

In my twenties, one of the most formative books I read about Christian mission was The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin, a pastor who spent much of his life serving in India. One of his core convictions has stayed with me ever since: that mission begins with “an explosion of joy.” Over the years, this has become something of a litmus test for me. Am I rooted in the joy of the Lord? And if not, what might God be inviting me to tend or change in my own life of prayer and trust? And then—when I invite others into faith—is it out of obligation, or out of delight?

Newbigin writes:

There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of “the mission mandate.” This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it a part of the law rather than a part of the gospel. If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression. Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact? The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving. One searches in vain through the letters of St. Paul to find any suggestion that he anywhere lays it on the conscience of his readers that they aught to be active in mission. For himself it is inconceivable that he could keep silent. “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:16). But nowhere do we find him telling his readers that they have a duty to do so.

One of my deepest prayers for Holy Comforter is that we would be a people who overflow with this kind of joy—joy rooted in Christ, joy shaped by love, joy that naturally spills over into welcome, generosity, and hope. May our life together be so full of God’s grace that it becomes compelling and contagious.

Below is a prayer from our brothers and sisters in Hong Kong written in 2019 that I have been praying for our country this week.

Loving God and Heavenly Father,
you alone are sovereign over all things,
nothing is hidden from your sight or outside of your control.
Yet, you are not distant from us, or unconcerned with our frailties.
In your Son Jesus Christ, you have come close to us.
He was familiar with our suffering, experiencing hurt and rejection,
taking on hatred and injustice,
bearing our shame and sin upon himself on the cross, 
being forsaken by you, so that we can be welcomed in your presence. 
Thank you that you have given us Jesus, our mediator and shelter
and your Spirit, our ever-present comforter. 

We pray for Hong Kong [and all other places in conflict],
for the restraint of violence and destruction,
for a resolution to the current crisis,
for the healing of division, and the binding up of wounds.
Bring a spirit of understanding and calm, of dialogue and empathy. 

Help your people not to succumb to bitterness and division,
but to walk alongside the broken, the hurting, and the grieving,
and to speak of a better hope; 
about the one who is the Light,
and who calls upon his followers to walk in the light,
to extend forgiveness and grace to others,
for we have been given measureless grace. 

You alone are sufficient, O God. 
Bring peace to our city, the lifting of despair and hostility, comfort in distress; 
and that many would turn to you in hope and faith. 
We ask these things, for your glory and in the name of our Saviour, Jesus.

Amen.

With much love,
Katie