Part of our rationale as Foreign Mission Committee in giving you a newsletter every three months is that a lot happens at the Study Centre in such a timeframe. Hopefully the reports confirm that for you—even if our reports only share a portion of the work of the RSC every quarter. Yet while much can happen over three months, we’ve all recently learned that it takes far less time than that to have your whole life flipped around. Seven weeks ago, none of us could have imagined having our lives characterized by social distancing, home schooling, working from home, self-isolating, hand sanitizing, and washing grocery packaging! But that’s today’s reality, with COVID-19 trending frequently in the news as well as in our minds. It’s then to our comfort to know and profess that the future belongs to our strong God, to the one who has reigned over every pestilence and plague throughout human history. And so we, also at the Study Centre, are striving to think along the lines of what the apostle writes in 2 Corinthians 4:17, that “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” COVID-19 is undoubtedly an affliction, but along with the suffering of the rest of this age, it is a light momentary affliction in comparison to the glory to be revealed at the return of Christ and our promotion into everlasting glory in his presence. 

That perspective is what the Lord is using to guide the Study Centre as it carries forward with the work. And so we then want to again bring you up to speed on the labours of Rev. Kampen over the last bit.

At the dawn of another year of our Lord, we thank him for his steadfast faithfulness to his promise to preserve and increase his church. A Scripture passage commonly read at the turn of the year is Psalm 90, where Moses, the man of God, concludes his prayer by declaring, “Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!” The Lord whose work is beautiful and weighty is the one to whom we must turn for help and blessing so that our work may have any measure of worth, beauty, and weight. Only he can promote our work to something useful in his kingdom! And so we now renew our petition at the start of 2020 that he would continue to use us as vessels for his glory, in all he gives us to do. He has promised. He is faithful. 

With that in view, we then share with you some of the work of Rev. Kampen for the Study Centre over the final few months of last year. While the report is among the shorter, its content reveals some very significant happenings in the mission work

Welcome to another newsletter on the work of the Reformational Study Centre! It’s our joy to once again share with you some of the activities and developments in the work over the past few months, with the hope that you give thanks along with us to our gracious Lord for his church gathering work in this world

Welcome to our first newsletter in this format! One of the central tasks of the Foreign Mission Committee (FMC) is to raise the profile of the mission project we’ve come to support in recent times, the Reformational Study Centre. In line with other mission projects in our circles, we judged it appropriate to help fulfill our task by way of a periodic newsletter. The more immediate benefit of such newsletters is that these will offer our congregation the quarterly updates on Rev. Kampen’s work for the RSC, along with other items of interest related to the mission work. Yet it is our hope that in the long run, we will be able to share these newsletters also with other churches that may be interested in them. In this way, more may also join us in prayerful support of the work of the Study Centre. 

As this is a new venture for us, we heartily welcome feedback from you on it, including what you might like to see in these newsletters. For, the FMC and Council may be the ones collectively supervising the mission work, but this work is and will remain something that you are all to be invested in. So, our lines are always open for input from you! 

For this first newsletter, we thought to restrict ourselves to updating you on Rev. Kampen’s work in the second quarter of 2019.’