NTM

Currently, some of my students are learning language and culture much the same way they would if they were newly overseas.  How are they doing that? Our course provides this practice through our teachers dressing up and role-playing a remote people group.

When our NTM missionaries move into a tribal village some day, they will have to learn the language and culture of those people without the benefit of some sort of language school sitting there waiting to teach them.  They will need to know what to do to learn it on their own.  (If you were plopped down in a remote village in a far-away country, how would you go about learning to speak their language?)  Part of our pre-field orientation course is to teach missionary candidates how to do this.

For about 8 weeks, our students will study culture in this way.

There are a number of other classes we teach, all to help prepare students for learning another language and culture.  One of those that we’re getting ready for right now is our Grammar 101 class.  This is not a class in English grammar.  This is a class that seeks to introduce our students to things that happen in languages all around the world.  Our students discover that other languages are very different from our own.

Even languages that are relatively similar to English, like Spanish and Portuguese, still do things quite differently from what we are used to.  For example, if you wanted to say “these little boys” in Portuguese, it would come out like this:

est-e-s                       menin-o-s                    pequen-o-s

^{this-masculine-plural     kid-masculine-plural     little-masculine-plural}

Notice how in Portuguese they have to tack letters on to the ends of the words to show whether you’re talking about someone that is male or female, and to show if there’s more than one.  Also, notice that the descriptive word comes after the noun.  It would be kind of like saying “these boys littles” in English.

Now take a language that’s really different from English, like this tribal language from South America where they use one long word for what seems like a whole sentence in our language.  To say “he suddenly smelled them” they say just one word “pjɪ̹dädäreno̹a̹deje̹re̹” (This comes out of a story about a dog chasing an animal in the jungle.)  In case you were wondering how that breaks down…

pjɪ̹dä         -däre       -no̹         -a̹            -de    -je̹re̹

^{smelling     finished    quick    past perfect    he    them}

To quote the NTM missionary who sent this to us, “God did a bang up job at the tower of Babel.”

After years of preparation and specialized training, students are graduating from New Tribes Mission’s Missionary Training Center! While this group may be small due to course changes, they pack a powerful representation of Christ’s love to the world. So…Pray with them as they delve into new geography, culture and language!

Building nests…and building churches. Both are a lot of work!

Each spring, outside our living room window we watch a LIVE INSPIRING REALITY show…the building of a bluebird’s nest, followed by the frenzied raising of the bluebird chicks.

If you thought you were busy, you oughta watch.

Throughout the year, we notice bluebirds checking the nesting box we have attached to a lamp post. Eventually, if their inspection passes, the activity starts. Both the male and female drag and push twigs into the small hole for hours.

One note of interest is that bluebirds don’t like “messy” boxes to nest in. After the birds are done nesting, John will clean out the box and that way they will come back again for another brood. 

Bluebird parents “team” raise their babies, bringing bugs to the peephole. If you watch for a while, you notice they are constantly searching for food for the young’uns, who wait eagerly for every morsel they can get. They don’t eat seeds. They love bugs, worms, insects, spiders…all that good stuff. I got one good photo of a bluebird  feeding a worm to its mate inside the box. What a job…and oh, how those babies cry in hunger.

I’ve gotten spooked mowing the grass around the post, and having a bird come flapping out of the hole at me. I think they are territorial. If we park close to the nest, a bluebird will come and sit on our van’s mirror, basically (I think) fighting his own reflection in the window. He also manages to leave a lot of white droppings there…making our van easy to find in the Walmart parking lot!

As the babes grow older, we get to see them peek out and survey the wide world. Eventually they flutter out for their first attempt at flying. This part is really cute to see. It is probably also a very dangerous time for them. I tried to watch and see if they ever came back to the nest once they left, but I never did see any come back.

Our job involves church planting. It definitely takes team work. Our small part in this massive job is to train missionaries to go overseas and plant churches. This involves building a church of people and feeding a hungry flock! A previous student, Scott Phillips, wrote about a small, new church on his website. He says that “God has taken this first small group of Dao people that not more than six months ago were not even aware that there even existed a savior that died for them, and He has changed their hearts so that they have fallen in love with Him and rarely stop talking about Him.” They are like the hungry little bluebirds wanting more food. The REALITY of it is… this is what we all should be like.

This is what makes any work worth it all.

By the way, the bluebird is the state bird for Missouri!

Click here to check out our bluebird photos

Wow. Once again, a group of wonderful people have finished New Tribes Mission’s training program. We thank God for each one of them! Please pray for them as most of them will be traveling a lot over the next several months, and will also be preparing for a move overseas.

This fall we have 82 students coming back from all over the country. Most of them have already completed 2 years of Bible College plus their first year of missions training. For the majority, this will be their last semester of school before they head overseas. The first thing those students will do when they get overseas is to begin learning the culture and the language of that country. For example, if they go to Mexico, they would spend the first 1-2 years learning Spanish. If they went to Brazil, it would be Portuguese, etc.

This fall, I will be helping to teach a course that prepares them for that task. A number of the faculty, myself included, will be dressing up and acting out the part of a tribal person 1-2 times a week over the first couple months. After having studied important principles and methods in the classroom, our students will be coming to us and practicing what they’ve learned. My students will be learning a little of the Indonesian language from me as well as beginning to investigate a tribal culture that I will be portraying. Kay will play the part of a tribal lady during part of this time as well. We’ve found this time to be both an enjoyable and practical part of the student’s overall preparation for going overseas.