New Tribes missionaries go to tribal people groups that live mostly in isolated jungle locations.
Many times these people have very little or no contact with the outside world. They usually have no written language and therefore, have no Scripture of any sort in their language.
In almost all cases, they have never heard a clear Gospel message and in many cases, have never even heard a "muddy" one. Therefore, there are normally no believers and never any kind of a functioning church.
NTM missionaries going to live and work in a tribal village have tons of work to do in order to plant a church there.
They must:
Build a house to live in
Build an airstrip or helicopter pad to receive supplies, since most places NTM missionaries go have no roads or any other ways to access these locations other than hiking a trail
Learn how to speak the tribal people's language
Write down and document their language using phonetic symbols since their language has no alphabet
Figure out exactly what letters should be a part of their language's alphabet
Figure out how to spell every word in their language and build a dictionary
Learn the tribal people's culture and try to understand their thoughts in order to convey spiritual truths to them in a way they will understand
Start translating God's Word into their language
Start Bible lesson preparation in their language using all the culture data that has been gathered and recorded
Figure out what order all the letters of their alphabet should be taught in the literacy classes
Prepare primers and little booklets to be used in the literacy classes
Teach the literacy classes so the people will be able to read God's Word as it is translated into their language
Train the tribal people to eventually take over the literacy program themselves
Teach the Bible lessons using the translated scripture.
Present the Gospel and plant the church
Help the new believers to grow spiritually in their knowledge of God
Train and disciple others to become teachers, leaders and elders
Continue translating and teaching the new Christians about God's plan for a mature, functioning Christian church
Help the new church see the need for missions and encourage them to reach out to others around them who have not yet heard God's message
It is a massive job that takes a huge amount of time. So what can help? Computers!
Which of the areas listed above can computers be a part of? Most of it!
NTM has developed and is updating custom software to help our missionaries in most of these areas. This software is called CLAware. CLAware assists the missionary from the time they first move into the village throughout their ministry there.
CLAware allows the missionary to file all the cultural data they gather about the people in a database. Each piece of data is tagged to a subject outline and organized in a special way to allow the missionary to retrieve just the data they need when they need it.
CLAware has filters which allow the missionary to select and view only a few records that directly apply to what he is looking for, as opposed to having to look though thousands of records.
The missionary can look at the entire record seeing every detail they have recorded, or they can switch to "Grid View" and see their data in a table showing more records but with fewer details -- only the details they need right now.
CLAware also assists the language learning process by allowing the recorded language to be played back repeatedly as the missionary learns it. It allows them to dump out the audio recordings to their MP3 recorder or IPod so they can listen to the recordings as they travel down the trail.
Once audio recordings are stored in CLAware, the complete recording or any portion of it can be transcribed. If the missionary chooses not to spend the time transcribing the recording, he can still very quickly tag it in several different ways so he will be able to find the data in that recording through many different venues.
CLAware helps create the dictionary after the missionary figures out the letters in the alphabet and the spelling of the words.
Once Bible lesson preparation is started, CLAware delivers all the filed cultural data to the missionary so they can produce accurate Bible lessons that the people will truly understand.
New functionality coming to CLAware soon:
It will help the missionary figure out what letters are needed in the alphabet for this language and how to spell the words.
It will allow the dictionary to be output to other software to do the Bible translation.
It will find just the right order in which the letters need to be taught in the literacy classes and will help with writing the primers that the people will learn to read from.
Please pray for the CLAware developers as they work toward getting a new version of CLAware out this fall with more and improved functionality built into the software.
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