Dear Christ Covenant,
We are continually grateful for each of you and how the Lord uses you to encourage and support our family.

We write to you today with some both exciting and sad news.  Over the past several months, it has become apparent that our time here in South Africa with East Mountain and United World Mission is coming to a close.  We are grateful for the time the Lord has given us here and how he has grown our ministry experience, marriage, family, faith and given us deep relationships.  Due to a growing desire to be more closely involved with a church centric ministry, and the continued difficulty of support raising outside of our denominational mission, we have decided to make a transition out of East Mountain and United World Mission.  In sharing this with our field leadership, they affirmed our decision and felt like a good transition period would be at the end of this year.  Our visas run out in the middle of 2020 and it makes good sense for us to finish the year here and then transition out.  We don’t believe that our time as missionaries is over and are in the process of applying with Mission to the World.  We would like to ask that you join us in praying about this transition.  The transition won’t be immediate as we will need to remain with United World Mission until we make the full transition to Mission to the World, which we pray happens in March of 2020. 

We will be leaving South Africa on December 21 and there is a whole lot that needs to happen over the next 12 weeks.  Please be in prayer for our family as begin to pack, sell, and give away all the stuff that we brought with us and bought or collected here.  We have a number of larger items that we will need to sell but are also still using.  We would ask that you pray for the timing of the selling of items.  There is a family here who is graciously allowing us to stay with them the last couple weeks of our stay.  That will provide us with a bit of a window to sell our appliances.

We would ask that you pray for the kids during this transition.  They are very much aware that something is up but don’t wholly understand everything that is coming.  Each of them seem to handle transition differently and we would ask that you pray that God would give us patience with them and that we would continually remind them the truths about our good God that it might encourage them.  We are also going to be saying goodbye to a number of significant relationships some of which we are uncertain if we will see in person again.  Pray that we handle this well and help our children in the process as well.

At this point, we don’t know much about the future.  We will spend Christmas with Maggie’s family.  It looks like we will make Knoxville our home base during our time in the US. We are hopeful that we can attend a Mission to the World evaluation in January and have a couple of missions conferences lined up for February.

As always, we are beyond grateful for all of your support through prayer and donations.  We look forward to keeping you informed about this transition and all that the Lord is doing.

For the sake of His great name among the nations,
The Halbert Family