Family and Friends:

Once again, all recipients of these Updates over the next two months are welcome to share them with others.

Carol and I have been in Mumbai for three days. As usual, things have been eventful. My major work has been to contact scholars who might discuss with our CUS students on the planned visit in Aug. as part of the "Appreciating India" course. This has worked out very well. There are enough resources here that we could just camp here and get all the resources we could imagine! However, I do want the students to experience the rest of India as well, so we are taking the night train to Nagpur tonight to line things up there as well.

On the mission side, we had some inspiring - and exhausting - experiences. We saw some more of the work among street children and sex workers' children.

One is a unique hostel set up on the second floor, above the chapel of one of our congregations. The other is a pioneering attempt to establish a whole village, taking the children away from the city into a tribal area where they can go to school and start life in a whole new manner. I'm sure the locale will be a great shock to these street children, but I hope they will stick long enough to build a new educational and spiritual foundation for their lives. This new project is being supported by the Joyce Meyers Foundation, which is devoting considerable resources to outreach in Mumbai.

Our pastors and probationers-as-church-planters keep asking for resources to purchase land in Mumbai so they can put up chapels for their new congregations.

However, land is just so expensive, that it just doesn't seem feasible. The only solution I can think of is to get established congregations of other denominations to share their facilities - which is being done in one location. However, in general they said that other pastors tell them simply to have their people join their congregation, even inviting them to come on staff.

We visited the "Maheem Church," an old Portuguese Roman Catholic parish which has become another of these pan-religious pilgrimage centers. Wednesday evenings they have a special service, and there was a huge crowd of all backgrounds. I took a photo of a Muslim woman in full burqa standing in front of a display of dozens of Christ pictures displayed by a vendor outside the church, trying to decide which to buy. People crawl up the aisle toward the altar on their needs, in Hindu pilgrimage form. They reach out to touch all the statues and photos around the chapel.

The service itself was in English, to make it available to people of all language groups in the city.

At the church guest house where we are staying (at $10 night), there is a young couple in "tent making" ministry. They have started a company for "medical tourism," arranging mostly hip and knee replacements for foreigners in local Mumbai hospitals. This is an increasingly popular approach to mission activity, both providing a service to the Indian economy and witnessing among the people with whom they interact.

The wife had been at a Rethinking Forum conference, so she immediately recognized me at the breakfast table and we began discussions on their work.

It's been a great asset having Carol with me this time, not just for my personal strength but also for the work. The community workers had a reception for us which both addressed. They had presented us with bouquets, and at the end of Carol's message she said that the ones who should be honored with flowers were not visitors like us but those doing the work of Christ on the streets. She then stepped out to give each of them a flower from her bouquet, and I joined with mine. The people really felt appreciated and said so. A great idea!

The first day here Carol expressed that a deep part of her is only touched and realized when she's back on Indian soil. One does feel welcomed in this society.

Often as one walks down the street, people give a warm smile of greeting as they pass.

Driving in Mumbai is a circus. The traffic is heavy all day long. Drivers are very aggressive. If one were not, one would simply not get anywhere. The highly infrequent fender benders is a tribute to everyone's great skill in the midst of all this close-quarter negotiating.

The community service group had us use their van on the trip to their sites. We had a unique experience when we looked for a place to have lunch. We ended up in a very expensive (by Indian standards) restaurant where a group of high class women were socializing (playing a kind of bingo). Unlike many drivers and cleaners (the young boy who sits as sidekick for the driver and does all the small errands along the way), they were included to lunch with us. It was great to see this scrawny boy in a t-shirt in the buffet line side-by-side with these plump, exquisitely dressed women.

An innovation for oil conservation and economizing has been the use of LPG gas in the taxis. We were confused the first time the driver stopped at a gas station, opened up his hood to get the gas air pumped in, and then asked us to get out of the taxi. Later we inquired, and a driver informed us that it is a legal requirement that passengers get out - in case of an explosion!

God bless.

Herb