Travel deals

Yesterday I mentioned some bargain airfares to Guam from the mainland US. Today Karyn forwarded to me an email with Northwest Airlines' current round-trip bargains from Guam to the US.
Honolulu ~ $616
Los Angeles ~ $704
Seattle and San Francisco ~ $759
Portland (OR) ~ $799
Las Vegas ~ $839

Island life and travel

NPR's All Things Considered carried a fun little interview with Joe Chargualaf down in the village of Inarajan. The story was about the Democratic caucus (The way things are working out Guam is actually on the radar at this point in the election process -- to the surprise of everyone on the island!) but Joe did more than talk politics -- he did a good job painting a picture of life in the more rural part of Guam. I think the story probably made the Guam Visitor's Bureau quite happy. ~ Link

BTW, if you're interested in traveling this way, I was checking airfares for someone this morning and you can do a round-trip from LAX to Guam for just under $1,000 -- if you're buying a ticket today. Last week one of our PIBC staff found a round trip from Guam to the States in the $800 range.

(I'm flying to Palau next week and the round trip ticket cost over $630. I'm flying to Chuuk the week after and that round-trip ticket cost over $525. If you calculate the cost per mile of flying it's definitely cheaper to fly to the States -- even if you get a $1,500 LAX to Guam round-trip.)

Most of the students at PIBC come from other islands in the Western Pacific. Guam is just a central hub for activity out here. And most of the islanders are culturally different (sometimes VERY different) than the Chamorro people who are indigenous to Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Part of the problem is that the islands, even though they're all facing similar economic, social, and cultural challenges, are all very distant from each other in miles. And this distance fosters an extreme form of parochialism. Happiness Lodge can fill you in on a few of the challenges of getting islanders to cooperate with each other.

A great Sunday

Three weeks ago Pastor Jeff Johnson's mother died in Michigan and he had to quickly return to the States. I've been filling in for him at the Lutheran Church of Guam -- leading worship and preaching -- which I'm more than happy to do. But I'm certainly glad that he and Mary are returning to Guam tomorrow.

The most difficult part of these three weeks was leading the early worship service which is more "traditional" Lutheran in style -- tightly structured liturgy, sung responses, and some chanting on the part of the celebrant (moi). (Cheryl and I usually help lead music at the second service -- where I play guitar and uke.)

Early this afternoon, after worship, we drove to Merizo on the south end of the island. Our friend Ferrell had invited us again to his family's fiesta.

Each Guamanian village becomes fiesta central on the day when the church honors the patron saint of the village. (For Merizo it is San Dimas.)

If you were so inclined you could walk from party to party throughout the village -- and be welcomed at each home -- even if you didn't know the family.

The villages in the south are particularly adept at throwing these parties -- thousands and thousands of people down there today. You just can't beat Chamorro hospitality and food.

We added the American touch bringing some of Cheryl's triple-fudge brownies.

It was picture perfect tropical life sitting under the canopies with the tradewinds keeping us cool and driving away the flies.

The south end of Guam is the more rural, cleaner than the central and north -- and spectacularly beautiful.

Benefit Concert

Last evening one of the local Korean Presbyterian churches hosted a PIBC benefit concert to help the student mission teams preparing to go to Palau and Thailand this summer. In addition to the students there were performers from Pacific Presbyterian, Faith Presbyterian, Bayview Baptist, and the Palauan Evangelical Church. Together they raised $1,070 in donations. Thank you.

In the pictures: Ned, Cheryl, Alvin, and Melissa display the collection. Delight Suda made the collection baskets from palm fronds.

Melody singing

The mission team headed to Palau singing

Hafa Adai #14

Hafa adai from Guam where we're in the dry season (read "less rainy"). The mangoes are firming up and the tradewinds (and air conditioning!) make the humidity more or less bearable.

SPRING SEMESTER
Just two more weeks and the spring semester will be history! We have 24 students from the Guam campus graduating on May 13th -- the largest graduating class yet.

Cheryl continues to work in the campus office; her current special project is preparing a list of potential scholarship recipients -- what a joy to help well-deserving students continue their education!

Brad is wrapping up his Introduction to Bible Study Methods class on the Guam campus. His other distance education class in Chuuk and Palau was canceled. That cancellation has turned out to be a blessing because there is so much expansion going on at PIBC right now that the administrative responsibilities are taking up a lot of time and energy.

• We're working out details with the Chuuk State Department of Education to raise the education level of their current public school teachers by enrolling them in our AA programs.

• At the same time we're trying to rethink the program that we have on Tol, a remote Chuuk island, to better suit the needs of contemporary Micronesia.

• We're developing a BA in education which will be offered primarily on the Guam campus, in addition to the BA and AA degrees in Bible.

• If that were not enough to keep our heads spinning, we are also working on the acquisition of Hawai'i Theological Seminary in Honolulu. This small seminary has been having some tough times and we were approached about absorbing them, their programs, and their students into PIBC. This week we received approval to start the MA program in the fall, and Eric Sorenson, another Covenant pastor and project missionary on staff at PIBC, is now the dean of the seminary. Brad, as VP of Academic Affairs (big title in a small school), is responsible for the planning and oversight of all the academic programs and faculty.

TRAVEL
In January, we cashed in some of our frequent flier miles and traveled to tropical Cairns, Australia for two weeks of vacation. It was good to get away from the chaos of the islands to some place more orderly to charge the batteries. We enjoyed learning a new language, figuring out how to drive on the opposite side of the road, and we were amazed with the assortment of plants, birds, bats, crocodiles, and kangaroos.We're ready to go back to see more of Australia next time.

Brad will be traveling to Palau May 6 to meet with students and staff there. The following week he'll be back in Chuuk for the graduation ceremonies on the Tol campus.

But our next big excursion will be back to the States for six weeks.

We leave Guam on June 3rd.

Roughly, this is our schedule:
June 4-7 Roseville, California area
June 7-12 Turlock, California area (Brad is speaking at Cornerstone Covenant June 8th)
June 12-14 Walnut Creek, California area
June 14-17 Irvine, California area (Kent graduates from UC Irvine June 15!!!)
June 17-21 Chicago/Rockford, Illinois area
June 21-28 Covenant Annual Meeting and "Feast" in Green Lake, Wisconsin
June 28-29 Walnut Creek, California area
June 29-July 5 "Missionaries in Residence" @ Mission Springs Family Camp, Scotts Valley, California
July 5-14 Phoenix, Arizona area
July 14 to LAX
July 15 return flight to Guam, arriving evening of July 16

FINANCES
We know that we can serve here only as long as the churches, individuals, and families who provide for our financial support continue to do so. We've been overwhelmed by your generosity and the follow-through with pledges and commitments that have been made. Thank you. We have lost some supporters through death and because people's financial situations change. So we continue to seek new support and to keep our financial needs on the radar. If you would like to support the ministry you can send a check or commitment response to:
PM Support for Boydstons
Department of World Mission
Evangelical Covenant Church
5101 N Francisco Ave
Chicago IL 60625-3676 USA

Checks should be made out to the "Evangelical Covenant Church" with the clear designation "for the support of Brad & Cheryl Boydston." If possible print and include this .pdf form - bradboydston.com/pdf/responseform.pdf . The form can also be downloaded from our website -- - Guam.Boydston.us .

PRAYER REQUESTS
As we pray for each of you by name we recognize the significance of the connections that we have with people from other times and places in our lives -- and we're glad that those connections are still strong. We are blessed to have so many active friends and family behind us. Keep praying for us and our students.

• Pray for our students as they (catch-up and) finish up the semester.

• Pray for the students who are preparing to be a part of the PIBC mission teams going to Thailand and Palau this summer.

• Pray for our missionary staff and those preparing to come to Micronesia as they work to raise support. There are also several potential missionaries in the discernment process.

OPPORTUNITIES

• We need some teachers with PhDs or ThDs in the areas of theology or New Testament who could come on a mission to teach for anywhere from 3 to 8 weeks (depending on how the course is configured) next spring or summer (2009) in our new seminary program.

• We need someone with institutional cooking experience who could come to Guam for a year or two as a short-term missionary to cook during the week for our 60 residential students.

• We need a mission team willing to raise funds for, and then to come construct, a new fence around the campus. Depending on the size of the team it could take from 2 to 3 weeks to complete the project.

Thank you for your partnership!

PIBC to offer master's degree

Pacific Islands Bible College has received authorization from TRACS, the school's accrediting agency, to begin offering a master of arts in religion (MAR) degree. This is PIBC's first graduate-level seminary degree.

We expect to begin the program this fall on the Guam campus by offering four classes.

The MAR program is an introductory seminary degree providing an in-depth study of the scriptures and the essential truths of the Christian faith. The program is designed for Christian educators, staff pastors, and others desiring a scriptural undergirding for service in a supportive role in a local church or other ministry.

Students in the MAR program will have the option of transferring into the planned 96 credit-hour master of divinity program (MDiv), which is designed to prepare men and women for vocational Christian ministry, once the second program is approved.

We will be accepting up to 10 full-time students, in addition to part-time students who apply for the program. To be considered for the MAR program an applicant must posses a bachelor's degree from an accredited college with a minimum GPA of 2.5.

Applicants for whom English is a second language must also have a 550 TOEFL score. Applications for the 45-semester-hour program will soon be available on the PIBC website.

Additional information is available from Eric Sorenson, the dean of the seminary program.

Briefly...

• Marisol Farnsworth, a part of our PIBC team, has her US citizenship interview and test tomorrow (Wednesday). Marisol, who is originally from Ecuador, should do well. Her English is good and she's been very thorough in her preparation. I'm pretty confident that her performance will be stellar. Still, we pray that she will be able to function at her best.

• PIBC president Dave Owen has made the first blog post from the island of Tol in Chuuk State, FSM. The Internet connection on Tol has been active for about a week. It is already improving our communication with the PIBC campus there.

• Otherwise it's been a rough few days on the Tol campus. Dave was there to inform the students that we are cutting the academic offerings on Tol back from three years to two years because of staffing and site maintenance concerns. We expect that most of the students who would have been third year students in 2008-2009 will come to the Guam campus a year earlier than planned. This will create some housing challenges for Guam.

• We will soon be increasing options for non-resident students on the Tol campus and hope to soon be offering the full AA program. The Chuuk Department of Education is asking for our assistance in training teachers for the public school system.

• Jens Schulz, our CFO, is currently in Hawaii, talking with the Hawai'i Theological Seminary leadership about our planned merger with them. Actually, "merger" means that their students would be absorbed into our program -- assuming that we get approval to teach seminary level classes.

• We're kind of stalled out in our fall class scheduling -- in limbo -- waiting to hear if we are approved to offer a graduate level seminary program. If we get the accreditor's approval we'll have to shift some of our teachers on Guam into teaching the seminary program. We would like to start the seminary program on Guam this fall with 10 students.

• This is a time of refocusing at PIBC. We are seeing that the best way at this time in history to have an impact on the islands is to develop leaders with a broad liberal arts background, as well as a Bible background. They need both so that they can be effective as teachers, government workers, and business people -- as well as church leaders. We are also sensing that the future of pastoral preparation and formation on the islands is shifting rapidly in the direction of graduate level education. This is an extremely complex social system and leaders are going to need advanced training if they are going to be effective -- especially as the tsunami of globalization washes over the islands.

• Delight Suda is back from Boston, where we had sent him for a seminar. Delight is our PIBC financial aid trainee -- and he had never been further from Guam than Chuuk. He had never been to Hawaii -- or the mainland -- never been on a long plane trip -- never to a place with more than 170,000 people (Guam) -- never seen snow -- until last week.

Briefly...

• The rumor on campus is that some of our Guam students have been chatting online with their counterparts on the Tol campus. Theoretically the computers on Tol are not completely connected to the Internet, yet, and I'm told that the Tol students aren't on the Internet, yet -- officially. However, some students somehow are apparently figuring out how to get online. This is why I'm optimistic about these guys. Just give the students a chance to connect and they suddenly become innovative and initiating. Now, if we can encourage them to venture further into it -- beyond IM and MySpace.

• Things are bone dry out here in the tropics and the National Weather Service has issued a fire weather watch for Guam. ~ Link

• Hawaii State Senator Kalani English sees tremendous progress in dealing with Micronesia area migration to Hawaii and other US states after many years of neglect. ~ Link

Islanders from the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia have visa-free entry to the United States. With economic conditions worsening in the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia, an estimated 2,500 are migrating annually to the US. Researchers estimate that close to 30% of the 70,000 Marshall Islanders and 25% of the 107,000 Micronesians now live in the US.