October 11, 2001

No teaching on Thursday has given Marthame the chance to develop our ministry (as well as giving him some freedom to move around a bit more). Thursday begins the University's weekend, and a crew of them were headed up to Haifa in the "Mystery Machine" - the nickname for their funky VW Van.

Melkite Bishop Boutros Ma’alim flanked by two American Presbyterians.

They dropped Marthame off, and he found his way to the Melkite Bishopric to meet with Bishop Boutros Ma'alim. The Bishop is a Palestinian Israeli, and has been in the position for three years. Marthame met with him (and then later shared lunch with him) to talk about the situation for the Melkite church and people of Zababdeh. We hope that we can do something to help the ministry for them here, but the decision rests with him. It was a very good meeting, though, and we will see where it goes from here.

He then headed to Nazareth with two pastor friends, one a fellow American Presbyterian who runs The Harbour, a ministry of support for pastors in the Galilee - one of their focuses is English language education. The other pastor is a Palestinian Anglican pastor in Shefa'amer, where we visited last March. They have been good friends for a long time, and Marthame enjoyed spending some time with them. He spent the night with the Presbyterians in Nazareth at The Harbour, and together they talked about what it means to be foreigners doing ministry here in these unprecedented times. Who knows what will happen, but we're all drawing up our contingency plans as much as we can.