“How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity! It is like precious oil poured on the beard…” (Ps 133:1). These are my awesome Persian ministry colleagues in Hamburg, of whom only one has a beard . From L to R: Rev. Marko Turunen, his wife Siiri (a gifted linguist, musician, and also psychologist), and Rev. Pasi Palmu—all from the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland (LEAF), a mission board of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. LEAF is a Confessional Lutheran group, so the four of us are completely in sync on Christian teaching. We three pastors take turns at every Persian Divine Service, with one of us doing the liturgy in Farsi, another preaching (in either Farsi or German), and the third pastor leading the subsequent Bible study. Last Saturday night Lula and I hosted Rev. Pasi because he needed to catch a flight to Helsinki the next morning and we live closer to the airport than he does. Just when we were about to turn in for the night, our phones chimed with alerts that the airport was being shut down because of an attack on an airplane, followed by a hostage situation. Shockingly, the next morning, the crisis was not resolved. The airport was still locked down and all public transportation to and from the airport was halted. Would Pr. Pasi be able to make it to Finland in time for his Monday meeting? To be on the safe side, he took his bags to church, hoping that the situation might be resolved by the time worship was over. Amazingly, the hostage taker surrendered peacefully right about when our Bible class concluded. Along with 32,000 other passengers, Pasi still had to work his way through the backlog of canceled flights, but he did eventually make it to Helsinki that evening, praise God. How good and pleasant it is when Christians live together in unity—and even have a shared purpose, in our case, baptizing scores of people from Iran and Afghanistan and teaching them that only Jesus Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Life.
The Tiews in Germany 