Summer 2025 Update

Dear friends and family,

Welcome to our ‘summer’ update. Here in the UK it feels like we might already have had our summer, coming off the back of a couple of months of almost unbroken sunshine! While the sun and warmth has been VERY welcome, the impact of even a relatively short spell without rain is easy to see. For us, it reminds us of the fragility of life, the importance of balance (something God built into nature and humans have sadly done our best to disrupt), and the impact of climate change. As a fairly small island the UK is at risk from rainfall changes, but thanks to contingency planning and relative wealth these risks can be mitigated to a large extent. Many other parts of the world are not so fortunate. Whether it's the significance of climate change, natural disasters or conflict, or the lack of resources to respond, they feel the impact far more strongly than we do. As a result, we’re keen that our work with Wycliffe helps to increase resilience in these communities in all areas of life. (Interested in reading more about this? Take a look at this Oxfam article and dive into the data with this country index.)

One way the LEAD Global team has been helping communities increase resilience over the last couple of months has been through participating in the 8th ECHO East Africa & HOPE International Conference on Sustainable Agriculture in Burundi. Matt’s colleagues attended this regional conference, organised by two well aligned faith-based development organisations, to share about the importance of local knowledge and language when responding to agriculture needs. As our team continues to learn about the needs and the ways local communities are responding sustainably to changes in their environments, it’s great to be able to share that knowledge with others at events like this to encourage appropriate and more sustainable responses.

Matt's teams annual plan and budget cycle runs from October to October, so this time of year also involves reviewing progress so far this year and looking ahead to next. As he reviews opportunities and associated costs, the team need wisdom to strike a good balance of faith and optimism and awareness of our limited resources. Please do keep them in your prayers at this time.

Did you know that since our last update we have also had another International Mother Language Day! 2025 actually marks the 25th anniversary of this annual day to highlight the importance of preserving linguistic diversity and promoting the use of mother tongues, and so is extra significant this year. Many of the communities with which Wycliffe work will have celebrated this day and a short blog post was shared about this on the Wycliffe UK site. If you haven’t already read it, do go and take a look and join us as we give thanks for the diversity represented in the thousands of languages and their speakers around the world.

This summer also marks 15 years since we left Tanzania, and so it felt like a good time to return… for a holiday! Over the years we have talked with the kids about taking them to see where we used to live and to visit some of our friends and colleagues, and thanks to some inheritance money from Liz’s grandma, the timing seems to work for this year! We’re excited to return and see what has (and what hasn’t!) changed since we lived there. Please keep us in your prayers as we prepare and then travel!

Thank you for continuing to keep us in mind, and for supporting our work in prayer and financially! We’ll be in Faringdon sharing at FBC at the end of June, so for those of you there we’ll see you then!

Sending lots of love, Matt, Liz, Levi and Anya