Dear prayer partners and faithful supporters,

A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting at another church where I had an interesting conversation with the speaker for the evening. He said, "So many of you Yanks come over here and when there aren’t great results straight away leave and go back to America. Being an Irishman, I’m from a Celtic culture similar to the Welsh; we understand each other. You Yanks think that things here are going to be the same as in America, and they’re not."

I know that he wasn’t necessarily talking about me, personally, but I did feel the sting of his words, possibly because much of what he said that evening was true.

There have been several families from the US that have come to Wales and gone back to America since we’ve been here. I’m not sure why the ratio seems to be higher in Wales than in England or Scotland; possibly missionaries come with the idea that Wales is the "Land of Revivals" (the last Welsh Revival was at its peak exactly 100 years ago) and when the Welsh do not come in droves to Christ, they become discouraged and fly out at Heathrow or Gatwick.

The culture of and way of thinking in Wales and all of the UK is quite different than in America despite our common heritage. Britain has been post-modern for decades. Imagine taking the thinking of "red" America (as opposed to "blue" America) and progressing that thinking ahead a few decades - there you have the thinking of the majority of Her Majesty’s subjects. A poll taken last month reported 44% atheist, 12% agnostic, only 44% believe in some sort of religion, of which by far the fastest growing is Islam. Britain is a post-modern, secular state determined to embrace multiculturalism. Abortion law and the definition of marriage are not decided by what is moral or by any great principles; no, such things are decided by what is pragmatic. For example, the 26 December 2004 edition of the London Sunday Times reports,

The Inland Revenue is considering recognising polygamy for some religious groups for tax purposes. Officials have agreed to examine ‘family friendly’ representations from Muslims who take up to four wives under sharia, the laws derived from the Koran. Existing rules allow only one wife for inheritance tax purposes. The Revenue has been asked to relax this so that a husband’s estate can be divided tax free between several wives.

No consideration of the rightness or wrongness of polygamy, only the pragmatic "Let’s get all of our pees and ques in order." It is all a matter of tidying up the legal fine print. Britain is indeed a post-modern, secular state determined to embrace multiculturalism.

And it is one that is filled with internal contradictions, such as Muslim women covered from head to toe in black, carrying their shopping bags past the front of a lap-dancing club in the city centre. It is the kind of sight that makes a person wish they’d brought a camera: there, in a single snapshot are the internal contradictions of a multicultural society. How can such blatant hedonism and ever-growing sharia continue to co-exist? It is proof that this modern multicultural state exists in a spiritual vacuum.

All of which brings me back to my Irish preacher-brother. Pray for your missionaries here, all of us, that we will be cognizant of, and sensitive to, the way things are different here, and that we’ll stay the course, continuing to proclaim Christ as the One to fill the spiritual vacuum.

Lifting up His glorious Name this side of the pond,

Tom and Patti Wheeler