Edminsters Online

Last month I had my first full day of visitations at Vancouver General Hospital as part of a chaplaincy internship I am enrolled in. The program will last until the end of next April and requires one 8 hour day of rotations at the hospital along with an 8 hour teaching day each week.

I’ve been looking forward to this experience for some time now, not only for the value of gaining skills and experience in walking with folks who are grieving loss of health or life, but also because (more…)

Dear friends,

Lea and I are wrapping up our business in Vancouver and preparing for our third and final summer project in Estonia. This summer’s tasks will be highly varied and so we are expecting it to be even more rich and rigorous than our previous summers have been. This is due largely to the fact that our time of study and exploration is slowly concluding. With the end in sight, it’s time to draw the loose ends together and make some decisions about the shape of our return to Estonia in 2007. The first solid indication that our studies are coming to a close came at the end of April when Lea walked through the Regent convocation ceremony and was awarded a Diploma of Christian Studies. In the course of her studies, she gained a solid grasp of Biblical studies and was able to explore areas of ministry to which she would not otherwise have had access, such as “Christian Counseling” and “Christian Education and Equipping Ministry”. We were especially grateful that her mother and two of her nieces were able to attend the convocation and to stay for a visit to the Northwest for a few weeks.

This summer will include more indications that “the end is near”. While in Estonia, I will be taking my final theology course by audio and will be studying for my senior ordination exams which will take place in late August. Together, Lea and I will also be meeting with our friends and ministry partners in Estonia and attempting to forge a clearer idea of the shape of our ministry when we return. In light of the continuing demise of the Viimsi Church and of our shift in focus away from the city and onto the rural situation, we are on the look-out for an opportunity to partner with one of the other pastors we have been working with in Estonian churches. These conversations will no doubt continue throughout the summer but they will be concentrated especially in late June and early July. Please join us in praying during these weeks for clarity and wisdom as we discern together with the Estonians and with Alongside Ministries what our next steps will be.

Once again, we will be helping to lead children’s camps in cooperation with our two main partner churches, Antsla and Avispea. The camp in Avispea will take place in early July. We will help to put together a four-day program which will include Bible studies, sports and campfires for 30 to 40 kids. In mid-July we will be joined for a week by a team from the Helena Evangelical Covenant Church to help the Avispea Church paint their guest house, split and stack firewood and reach out to the local community. As we send the Helena team back to the United States, our second team will arrive from the Alongside Discovery 2006 conference in France. This small team will help us to organize a week of day camps for children and youth in Antsla. We are planning interactive, creative bible studies in the morning, games and sports in the afternoon and campfires in the evenings.

Our summer in Europe this year will end with a week of debriefing and celebration with fellow Alongsiders at the AD2006 mission and study conference in France. We are excited to have two Estonians join the project this year. Both Toivo Kimmel and Sven Kits are from Tallinn and have been recognized as young men with a lot of potential. Our hope is that they will take the experience of this project back to their home churches and expand and enrich the Estonian understanding of missions. If you would like to support either of these young men financially, please contact the AMI office at the address listed below.

One special treat this summer is that Matt’s youngest brother Sam Edminster will be joining us for the entire summer. As the resident athlete in the Edminster family, Sam has been given responsibility for organizing and explaining pick-up games of common American sports like baseball, flag football, ultimate Frisbee and Frisbee golf. He’ll be involved in our work projects and camps and we are looking forward to having his energy, charisma and companionship on our team.

We are excited about the adventures that await the three of us this summer. We’ll keep in touch as often as possible through our blog at www.edminsters.com and we’ll let you in on the full scoop once we’ve returned and settled back into our academic schedule in the Fall.

We are grateful for your ongoing friendship, prayers and support! We couldn’t do all this without you.

Sincerely,

Matt and Lea

One of the things that troubles me most about ministry talk in the church is how often we elevate monetary and physical resources above human ones and how this juxtaposition of values can undermine our ultimate mission. It seems to me that Church history would indicate that some of our healthiest seasons have been when saving grace, Christian character, and the sustenance and guidance of the Holy Spirit were the only commodities we could count on.

This seems to also be the case in our current situation where some of the most sustained growth is happening in places where resources are at a bare minimum. Conversely, the health of the Church in the West is slowly diminishing in spite of the fact that we hold the vast majority of the world’s resources.

All this begs the question: What are the Church’s most important resources? Here are some of my thoughts about the importance of discipleship in the church over against our dominant “resource paradigm”. (more…)

The following is a paper I wrote for Pastoral Ethics in the Fall semester of 2005.

When I first entered the mission field after graduating from college, I did so as an intern. I was sent to serve alongside a small congregation in Estonia working to support the youth ministry. I had committed two years to this project and wanted to use this time to test whether ordained ministry was a calling or simply an interest. I had no intention of staying another three years, no expectation of developing a love for ministry and discipleship, not even the foggiest idea that I would meet my wife there and eventually return to commit myself long term to cross-cultural ministry in Estonia. In these early years, I was referred to at home and in Estonia as a “missionary”. This was undeniably my function, but I balked at the title aware of the high expectations and responsibilities bundled with it. If I was a missionary, it was entirely by accident and fulfilling the function alone was not enough to convince me that I met the standards involved in the title. At the end of five years in Estonia, I was assured that mine was indeed a call to ministry and specifically to the pastorate. My desire was to return to Estonia to develop a stronger sense of discipleship in the church and to find ways to support struggling rural churches. But to do so required that I accept the mantle of missionary and all of the spiritual and professional responsibilities it entails.

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Dear friends,

We arrived in Tallinn on St. John’s night – the longest day of the year and Estonia’s biggest national celebration – and were deeply satisfied to be back in the land of family, friends, dark bread and weekly saunas. There wasn’t much time for rest though. Our first two weeks were full of preparations for our partnership project with Pastor Eerek and Pilvi Preisfreund who minister in the small town of Avispea.

Both Eerek and Pilvi grew up with Lea in the Viimsi Church. Eerek has been pastoring the Avispea congregation for seven years. Avispea is a small farming town in North-East Estonia. In a rural church with 24 elderly members, there is no money to pay a pastor. So Eerek works as an engineer at a local dairy. His job keeps him busy all week and is frequently demanding—the Soviet-era machines break down! Pilvi cares for Andreas (7) and Mattias (2), and also is studying to become a primary school teacher. A week after our mission with the Preisfreunds finished, they will have taken their first vacation in three years!

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