Missions

Spreading the Word

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Bill Teaching Missionary Trainers and Consultants

We’re Excited!

Recently we held a week-long international training event at Ethnos360’s missionary training campus in Missouri. Bill and his team taught about 50 people who came from around the world how to use their newly-developed materials for CLA (Culture and Language Acquisition). It was fun to return to that campus. We lived there in that scenic place for two years back in the 70s (one year as students, one year as teaching staff), and our first child, Elisa, was born during those years.

The Beautiful Lake of the Ozarks, Where Ethnos360’s Campus is Located
Attendees Came from All Around the Globe

What?

After years of development, Bill and his team are thrilled to be able to start making these long-anticipated materials available. They presented Engage, their new, comprehensive guide on how to learn a language and culture step-by-step. And they demonstrated Stages, the brand-new app that will make using Engage easier. This event was the first in a series of “roll-out” events to be held around the globe over the next year or two.

Who?

The 50 attendees represented 7 nationalities, a total of 8 missionary training programs, and 11 countries of service. They will all begin to use Engage and Stages to train new missionaries, and to help missionaries reach fluency in new languages and deep insight into the culture and worldview of the unreached people groups those missionaries minister to.

Five of the attendees were from our Spanish and Portuguese resource teams. They will be translating Engage and Stages into those languages to make them available to missionaries from 8 different countries in Latin and America and SE Africa.

Consultants, Trainers and Translators from our Latin American Fields

Why?

To communicate clearly and effectively evangelize an unreached people group, missionaries need to effective communicators of God’s truth. In order to do this, they must become highly fluent in the language of the people group, and they much gain a deep insight into the people group’s worldview. But learning an unknown language and culture is a challenge, since there are no schools or resources. It has to be a do-it-yourself effort that takes several years. Engage and Stages will help to make this daunting task a little easier and will make the task of training and coaching missionaries much easier, as well.

Stages, an App Like No Other

Attendees Had the Chance to Install and Try Out the Stages App

We presented the Stages app and then let the attendees try it out for themselves. They have been waiting for this tool! Many of the workshop attendees suggested some great new features, and they helped us find a few bugs or issues with specific devices. We really appreciated their help. There is no app that has anything like the features of Stages. It will be a huge blessing to missionaries in our mission and other missions as well.

What’s Next?

Since the roll-out event in Missouri, Bill and his team have been preparing for future events by finalizing and adding to some of their materials and including many of the attendees’ suggested new features to the Stages app.

Over the coming months, Bill and some others will also record online video training courses for both Engage and Stages, making it easier to train more people globally with a little less travel. Bill is also working with the various translation teams. In addition to Spanish and Portuguese, we hope to get Engage and Stages translated into Thai, French, Indonesian, Chinese, and possibly a few other languages.

Posting Training Videos Online Will Make it Easier to Train More Missionaries More Efficiently

Please Pray

Bill and Donna – Expanding the Reach of the Gospel by Training Others to Reach the Unreached

We appreciate your prayers for us, our health, and our ministry as we labor to get many more well-trained missionaries out in the Lord’s harvest fields reaching the Unreached! Health update: since Bill’s ablation, his heart rhythm remains steady and normal, and he has his energy back. We’re so thankful for this!

A Short Update on the Palawanos…

Ispiling Selling Us Some Chickens in 2006

Please continue to pray for the Palawano church. Bill is in communication with several of the believers, including some of the men who lead the church in our old village. They are currently studying through 1 Peter in the Palawano New Testament, and seeking to build unity in the church in the face of Satan’s attacks. Bill was particularly encouraged recently to learn that his old friend Ispiling was now a believer. Ispiling was a fun guy. The whole time we lived among the Palawanos, Ispiling loved to joke and laugh with Bill on our porch, and was always ready to help with any work projects we hd, but he was never open to the Gospel. Now in his old age, God has softened his heart and he is following Christ.

What Drives Us?

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If every Christian in the world shared Christ with every single person they knew… and all of those people believed, there would still be two billion people in the world who had never heard the gospel.

 

-David Platt (Cross 2015, paraphrased from one the testimony of one of our Radius students)

 

 

(sorry, but the video we shared in our last post suddenly became “private” and unable to be viewed)

Over the Border and Around the World

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Training in Tijuana

Last week we once again had the privilege of teaching at Radius International in Tijuana. There are 11 students there this year, all being trained to go to the hard places of the world, and take the name of Christ to Unreached People Groups.

They are also being taught how learn the Heart Language of the people to whom they will minister, and that’s where we come in. This semester Bill taught a 10-hour course called Form and Meaning.

Form & Meaning? What does THAT mean? Glad you asked…

Form & Meaning

Missionaries have the most important message in the world (that’s the “meaning” part.) They want to communicate that message clearly. But that’s not so easy. To have effective cross-cultural ministry, they need to be trained about what to say and do (that’s the “form“) that will clearly get that message across.

The trouble is, people around the world communicate meaning in different ways. Each language and culture has unique forms to share a particular message. Sounds, words, letters, grammar, gestures, even acts of friendship… all are forms that communicate very different meanings.

THERE IS NO UNIVERSAL WAY TO COMMUNICATE A PARTICULAR MEANING

Bill teaching Form & Meaning at Radius

It’s All About That Meaning

Here are some fun examples of form/meaning differences:

  • Letters: The letter j represents one sound in English (as in “jump”), but a different sound in other languages: h as in Juan in Spanish, y as in Bjorn in Swedish, etc. “What a j sounds like” is completely arbitrary.
  • Words: “Cat” in English is gato in Spanish, right? Well, kinda. Gato also means a car jack, a person from Madrid, and many other things. Words don’t have one-to-one correspondence.
  • Metaphors: In our English Bibles, we have “edge” of a sword; but in the Hebrew and Greek it is actually the “mouth” of the sword (yes, it’s a double-mouthed sword in Hebrews and Revelation!) In Palawano, the “mouth” of the sword is its tip; the blade or edge is called the “eye” of the sword.
  • Grammar: English has the single word “us.” Palawano has three different words, meaning: “us, but not you,” “just you and me” and “you, me and all of us.” Three forms. English has one form, and lumps all three meanings together.
  • Little Things: English has about 150 prepositions and some of them, like “of,” for example, have a dozen or so meanings! Some languages have ONE preposition. Meaning gets communicated with very different forms.

And those are just the easy kinds of differences!

Expect the Unexpected

  • Turning verbs into nouns: Some languages don’t make nouns (repentance, baptism) out of verbs (repenting, getting baptized) the way English and Greek love to do.
  • Making friends: What if saying “I just got you a little something” was an insult? What if saying that a baby was beautiful made the mother frightened (because you just alerted the evil spirits to where a cute victim was)? What if you were supposed to change the form and say that the baby was “ugly” and mother (but not the spirits) would understand the meaning to be, “Oh, what a cute baby!”? What if you gave a friend a dozen roses and they understood you to mean, “Drop dead!” because it was an even number?
  • Asking questions: And what if Jesus’ rhetorical question, “To what shall I liken the Kingdom of God?” meant that he really didn’t have a clue and was asking the disciples to explain it to him?!

In each case, you would have to make some big changes to communicate what you meant to say.

THE FORM MUST CHANGE FOR THE MEANING TO REMAIN THE SAME

That is the lesson Bill was teaching the students. They cannot afford to “think English and translate.” They must learn to think about the meaning and communicate that in the best form. In the fall semester, Bill will teach them more about how to discover the underlying meaning.

It’s a joy and a privilege to teach these eager missionaries and to get to know them. Both of us enjoyed chatting with them over lunch and answering their questions about missionary life.

Oh, and by the way, lunch at Radius is always awesome:

IMG_1139

Thank God with us…

  • a good week of teaching
  • no hassles driving in and out of Mexico 5 days in a row
  • safety in spite of a flat tire on the interstate (after leaving Mexico on Friday)
  • the privilege of training others to reach the Unreached

What Would You Do?!

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What would you do…

…if you found yourself in a remote village and had to learn the language?

…if no one there spoke any English? …or they spoke no English at all?

…if there were no CDs, books, teachers, schools or websites to help you?

…there were no dictionaries or published explanations of the grammar?

What would you do if you had to learn that language ALL BY YOURSELF?

This is the very situation in which missionaries who work with Unreached Peoples find themselves. They need to learn the people’s Heart Language. To do this they must succeed at do-it-yourself language learning (and no… sadly, there is no machine to instantly zap the language into your brain.)

Missionaries need help. Lots of help.

What we are doing…

New Tribes Mission provides that kind of help. Our training programs in the USA, Canada and Europe, etc., train missionaries how to learn unknown languages, to learn them well enough to minister effectively; to preach the gospel, to turn new believers into serious disciples, and to teach and counsel those disciples through life’s most difficult challenges.

But what about missionaries who do not speak English and cannot benefit from those training programs?

A big part of our new ministry is to think about how to provide this kind of training for non-Western missionaries around the world. Next week we’re going to our mission headquarters so Bill can meet with other members of his team. We are working to collate the latest and best language learning helps, and to come up with easier ways for the average missionary to analyze a new language and figure out the grammar.

We are thinking especially of how to help those missionaries who are not already fluent in English. So on top of everything else, we will face the challenge of taking all those training materials and having them put into languages like Hindi and Tamil and Chinese and Vietnamese and Burmese so we can train missionaries coming out of Asian countries who want to work with Unreached People Groups.

We believe that the Heart Language is the best way to communicate with anyone. So that is why we want to help these non-Western missionaries to minister in the Heart Language of Unreached Peoples. Well, it also means we need to train these missionaries using their Heart Language!

What you can do…

Pray for us! Pray for wisdom and clear thinking, for open doors to develop training for missionaries from other nations. Pray as we face the challenge of translating these materials and equipping trainers who can teach them. Pray for God to richly provide for the needs of this ministry. Consider partnering with us financially. Pray that we remain healthy and have the strength we need.

We appreciate each one of you. You are making a difference in the world. You are investing in seeing the gospel clearly communicated to Unreached Peoples….

…Because everyone deserves to hear in their Heart Language.

Sitting in Darkness

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Light of the WorldHere is a thought-provoking view of the world.

In Matthew 5:14 the Lord Jesus called us the light of the world. We are light bearers, commissioned to carry the message about Him, the true Light of the World.

The dots of light of this map show where Christians are…

…and where we are absent.

See how much of the world remains in darkness.

 

Image courtesy of The International Mission Board Global Research, January 2015,

Image source  http://public.imb.org/globalresearch/Pages/MapLight.aspx