NTM

There have not been that many new missionaries headed to Paraguay through New Tribes Mission for a while…until now. There are now several families and singles enroute to Paraguay to share the good news of Jesus Christ with the unreached of Paraguay. We are a part of the group heading there that graduated from the Missionary Training Center in December of 2008.

Come…Pursue Paraguay!

Team Paraguay from Bryson White on Vimeo.

At first glance, this may appear to be a boast of our giving and willingness to sacrifice. But really, this is a tribute to God’s provision.

You see, just because we’re training to be missionaries, doesn’t mean that we no longer have the responsibility to give financially to missions. We already had a couple commitments of giving before entering the training in August of 2007, so we kept doing that. I’ve never been one to be strict on giving an exact tithe, but I have looked at 10% to be a gauge of our giving. Well, due to those commitments of giving, for our first year and a half here we were giving about 12.5% of our income, which doesn’t seem like all that much except when you consider that the 12.5% came to a grand total in the double digits.

But recently, God has seen fit to increase our support as we get closer to leaving for the field, and we saw that 12.5% fall to 6.5%. Of course, that means that we’ll be increasing our giving, but the glory cannot go to us. The glory goes to God who sees fit to “give us a raise.” Thank you to those of you who responded to God’s urging in your life and have committed to supporting our ministry. I hope and have prayed that God will bless your generosity. Know that we’re in this ministry together. If you want to witness God’s provision in our lives, keep an eye on this graph that we’ll be updating monthly.

The following are several of the classes that we had during this last fall semester. Together, they rounded out the majority of our preparation to begin church planting. We covered topics concerning daily living in a tribal location as well as a model of what a maturing indigenous church should look like.

CLA Practicum
CLA (Culture/Language Acquisition) is a process that we will go through at least twice: for the national culture and language and for the tribal culture and language. The structure of its name is very intentional. It is not culture and language, but culture/language because the learning of these things are so intertwined with each other. As for the order of the words, language is often thought of as being the more important of the two, but culture is at least as important. So, to diffuse that thought, culture is listed first in the name.

We had culture/language sessions with a Dobu helper. She was actually an instructor dressed up as a tribal person and we met outside her tribal house where there was smoke and unfamiliar smells. She spoke a real tribal language. There were 12 of these helpers that different groups met with to gather cultural and language information; together they shared a very intricate culture. We were introduced to several techniques for learning language with this helper and for gathering cultural information and organizing all this into software specifically designed for this. At the end we did a write-up on the specific topic that we had investigated.

Practical Skills
Practical skills sought to give us an overview of what skills we would need on the field. We were exposed to cooking from scratch, taking care of boats, taking care of and using chainsaws, the theory of building a house, and other various things that we will have to do for ourselves.

Missionary Technology III
Missionary Technology III gave us time to practice what we had learned in the previous Missionary Technology courses. We were given a chance to hook up solar panels, troubleshoot a photovoltaic system, and restore batteries by zapping their dendrites!

Literacy
The Literacy class gave us a look at how to teach the tribal people to read their own language. We were shown how to write literacy primers, then we practiced making one in Pidgin English and teaching through a literacy lesson.

Translation
This class introduced us to the process that we will be going through on the field to get the Bible into the tribal people’s language. We were given an opportunity to practice the translation techniques we learned by using one of today’s translations and re-writing the translation having a specific group in mind.

Developing Church
The Developing Church class sought to give us an idea of what our responsibilities and what the tribal people’s responsibilities will be during the development of the church. This time period spans from when we first get to the tribe until we have mature believers. We want to get the tribal people involved in their church as soon as possible.

Maturing Church
In this class, we were given a goal to keep in mind while we are evangelizing. Our goal is to plant a church and to enable them to grow into maturity. Eventually, we hope to be their partners, following their leadership as we go to the next tribe to see the Gospel spread to the ends of the earth.

Overall, we have had a wonderful experience here, going through these classes. Now we are in our last class, Linguistics. This is an advanced class for preparing to develop an alphabet for an unwritten language and for translation. We are extremely excited about being able to use these tools that we have learned in Paraguay.