Expanding our Reach - Robinson Ministry Update November 2025

Greetings from Lancaster!

November seems to have disappeared like frost in the sunshine. Thankfully, we have had a reasonable dose of the latter and not too much of the former so far, though this last week up here has been fresh!

Dan seems to have finally kicked the series of viruses that he had. He had a Chemistry mid-term exam that he spent a fair bit of time preparing for, and he felt like it went really well, which is encouraging. The rest of his exams will be in January. We are looking forward to picking him up and bringing him home for Christmas in mid-December. 

Tim outside the US embassy in London

Tim continues to work on policy and procedure updates alongside supporting ongoing incidents and situations. He had a trip to London for an afternoon conference held by OSAC, the U.S. Department of State’s Overseas Security Advisory Council. It is one of multiple sources of information that Tim uses in his day-to-day understanding of what is happening in the world at the moment, looking for things that might impact our staff or projects.

They met in the American Embassy, which was a new experience, and a cool building! 

Ali is looking at the Language data

Ali: On the Ethnologue team, we have been working on setting up our regional editors. We now have regional editors for Sign Languages, Global Languages, and the Americas. An editor for the AsiaPacific area (think islands in the Pacific Ocean - Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Vanuatu etc) is getting ready to come on board in January, and one for Africa in February. Then our only remaining gap will be someone for the EurAsia area.  Please do pray that we can identify the right person for this role at the right time.  Another area for prayer in this is for the work that we need to do on the online platform that we use to do the editing. With several regional editors, we need some changes to our process so that the right things end up in the right people’s job lists and nothing gets missed. The planned work to achieve this has been delayed due to financial constraints, and it is now looking like the updates may not happen anytime soon. I know this all sounds rather boring and not very "cutting edge missionary", but up-to-date and accessible language data is vital to enabling many organisations to make strategic decisions on how best to use the resources God has released so far for this work. Please pray that God will provide all that we need to serve him to the best of our abilities and that we will be wise in how we use whatever God does provide.

Tim and I, well, Tim really, managed to book a cheap last-minute holiday for next week, so we are looking forward to a proper break. Please pray for rest and reconnection for us. 

Praise

• Dan feeling healthier

• Helpful trip to London for Tim

• Looking forward to a holiday!

Prayer

• Dan to finish the term well and have a good break over Christmas

• The right Ethnologue Regional Editor for EurAsia

• A good solution to managing the workflow for the Regional Editors