St Alban's and Trincomalee

Peter, John and Grahame with the Trincomalee team

In February 2006, John Beaney, Grahame Knox and Peter Johnson from our church visited Sri Lanka to learn more about the Alliance Development Trust projects in Trincomalee in the northeast of the island. The National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka (NCEASL) provides training, expertise and resources to local churches to enable mission and humanitarian aid to be brought to people. This is done mainly through their relief arm, the Alliance Development Trust (ADT), which has an office in Trincomalee.

In 2005 our link missionary with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) retired. We wanted to review how we would support mission at home and abroad and brought the two themes together in one team. Through his work with national Evangelical Alliances in Europe and worldwide, Grahame has personal contact with Godfrey Yogarajah (General Secretary of NCEASL) and knew about the situation there. Sri Lanka lost over 35,000 people to the tsunami which compounded an already bad problem with the civil war in the country. So it seemed a natural choice and one we were all happy with.