August 15, 2007

Dear Friends,

The Marsden family will be returning to Richmond, Virginia, in December and Don will take up work with Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship.

There has been a long gap, a lapse in my communication with you, due in large part to a nagging doubt about our plans for the future. We have frequently asked God to guide us through this wilderness of indecision. After months of persisting in that request, the fog of uncertainty has been lifted. We have received a sense of the direction we need to go.  God is faithful to his word in the 32nd psalm—“I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.” I write to tell you of our experiences and plans.

Although we had discussed it often in the preceding year, our decision to request a furlough from our mission work in Russia was made quite suddenly about this time last year. The stress level in our family circle had been running very high. We felt a need to be closer to our family with two daughters attending college in the States. Both my mother and Laurie’s mother were battling with poor health. After nine years in a rented apartment in Russia, we were feeling a strong homesteading impulse, the need to put our name on a little plot of land and call it home for our family.

More than once during the past year, I have pondered the words of the 127th psalm—“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” In the economy of the kingdom of God, the family is a basic building block. The family is the house the Lord is building. The family is the building block through which God is building a city and a kingdom. The family is, as it were, the smallest mission station, a little outpost, a little colony of the kingdom of God. When the little colony threatens to collapse a restorative work is needed.

We are grateful that our World Mission staff at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Louisville saw fit to grant our request for a furlough. Not only that, they prohibited me from traveling to speak in churches for the months of October, November and December. This gave Laurie and me time to find rest for our own souls as we established a slower rhythm for family life and spent Sunday mornings worshiping and taking in spiritual nourishment at Third Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia. It was a great blessing to reconnect with many friends in this congregation where I served as an associate pastor for eight years before we embarked on mission service in Russia. We were also strengthened by taking part in intensive care sessions for cross-cultural workers at Heartstream Resources in Liverpool, Pennsylvania.

In January I began to visit and speak in churches. My travels took me to churches in Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, California, Delaware, South Carolina, North Carolina, Connecticut, Florida, and South Dakota as well as Virginia. It is one of the paradoxes of life that I have seen, learned about and come to love many places in my own country as a result of serving as a missionary in Russia. I take great pleasure in these visits to the churches as an opportunity to convey what I see God doing in Russia and Siberia, to help acquaint people with the grassroots, frontier movements of the gospel in distant places of our world.

While I was out visiting churches in Washington and California in April, Laurie and Jeremiah made a trip to South Carolina to spend a week with Laurie’s parents. Her mother, Judy Allen has been fighting a battle for her health on more than one front. She and her husband Cliff are coping as best they can and keeping a positive attitude. It was a blessing for Laurie to be able to spend a week helping out and enjoying the company of her parents. Laurie, together with various groupings of our family, has made three such trips to see her parents.

In early May we interrupted our plans to visit churches in South Carolina in order to visit my parents, Don and Connie Marsden, in Connecticut, because my mother was taken to the intensive care unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital. At age 81, she had been fighting cancer for the fourth time in her life. She fought courageously, but could not wrestle the cancer into submission one more time. On May 16, around seven in the evening, she breathed her last and returned to our Creator. It is impossible to sum up succinctly the thoughts and feelings that come with losing a parent, but Laurie and I count it a tremendous blessing that we were able to be with my mother during the last days of her life, to know that she had a peace and clarity of mind right up to the end. Our family gathered with friends for a memorial service in New Haven on June 16—the weekend that would have been my parents’ fifty-eighth wedding anniversary. My mother was a person of great integrity, wisdom, and good humor. True to her name, Constance, she was constant in devotion and service to her family, friends, church, college, and community groups.

For a prolonged time I grieved over the thought of giving up the role that has come to mean very much to me these past ten years, because I have loved being a missionary in Russia. In the course of time it became progressively clearer and clearer to me that our family needs a stable home base in the United States that allows us to be with our children and our parents more often.

In July a decision was reached that, beginning January 1, 2008, I will join the staff of Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. (Please see the letter from Bill Young about my appointment.) Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship is a validated mission support group working closely with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in its worldwide efforts to extend the gospel of Jesus Christ to unreached people groups, that is, ethnic groups having no self-reproducing church in which the gospel is preached in the language and terms of their culture. For more information, see PFF's Web site. 

Working with PFF will allow me to continue working with the mission partners in Russia and Siberia whom I have come to know and love since 1993, and concurrently for us to make our home base in Richmond, Virginia. Most of my time will be spent working with U.S. churches, but I will continue to travel to Russia and Siberia focusing especially on outreach to the native peoples of Siberia.

So here are our marching plans. Jeremiah and I will return to Moscow on August 25. Laurie will join us on September 2, after helping Hannah get settled for her senior year at Asbury College and Christiana for her sophomore year at Gordon College. The months of September through December will be spent meeting with Narnia Center staff and partners in ministry in Russia and Siberia to plan the road ahead of us. We will move out of our apartment in Moscow in late December and move to Richmond to the address at the head of this letter.

One of the big changes about our future is that we will need to raise our salary support.  Will you consider being one of our supporters? If so, please send me an email and I will see that a pledge card and a return envelope will be mailed to you. At the same time, I want to encourage churches to also continue supporting a PC(USA) missionary.

Of great importance and concern is the future of Narnia Center. Our expectation is that Narnia Center will continue its work without any major interruption. During our furlough, Narnia Center has continued to publish books and magazines as well as conduct training events throughout Russia. Late in March and in the early days of April, we returned to Moscow for a week to spend time with the staff. Since our visit, Narnia Center has printed six books: The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth Speare; Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byers; Alphabet of Fairy Tales by Viktor Krotov; My Sister is an Angel by Ulf Stark; Ignatius the Worm and his Dreams by Viktor Krotov; The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald. They have reprinted three books by Katherine Paterson including, Bridge to Terabithia. Books in preparation include I Married You and The Misunderstood Man by Walter Trobisch, Sermons by Karl Barth, and many more.

Narnia Center now has seven full- and part-time staff members. Book sales provide a significant source of income, but not nearly enough for the organization to survive independently, so I ask you to continue to send financial support for projects for Narnia Center through the Outreach Foundation or the ECO provided by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I remain committed to working with the Narnia Center staff, Russian partners, and U.S. supporters so that Narnia remains a dynamic publishing and teaching ministry that helps to shape the faith of Russians and equips the Russian church for God’s mission.

I am enthusiastic about my future work with Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. It is my hope to continue working with many of the congregations that have supported us during our ten years in mission service with PC(USA). After January 1, 2008, I will be available to visit congregations to speak at mission conferences and other events. Please write to me at my email address marsden@eamail.net.

Faithfully yours,

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 186