NTM

After driving all night and going 4 days on 11 hours total sleep, we arrived in GA to smiles and good ol southern hospitality on Wednesday morning.  This place is our favorite place in the world.  We love the pine trees, fresh peaches, coastal living, and armadillos.  Every scent and sight invoke the deep emotions of home.

But why are we taking 8 weeks in St. Marys GA?  To recap, our home area is Camden Country GA.  We have spent the majority of our married life there, and Jon has spent the majority of his single life there.  We have always been a part of the same church here at First Baptist St Marys, and they just so happen to our sending church.  We only left to go to training at the Missionary Training Center in Missouri last year.

Now we have a summer break from training for 12 weeks.  We have decided to spend the lion’s share in our sending church for 3 reasons.  The first reason is we are a bit homesick.  We miss the sights and sounds, and are jumping at the oppurtunity to be back home.  The second reason is to help our church with their busy June church calender.  We have a kids camp and two vacation bible schools during June, and workers are needed.  We are thrilled to jump right in next to our friends.  The third reason is to explain our ministry and financial needs to both our sending church and individuals within the sending church.

We are having a blast staying with a couple in our church.  They are really sacrificing for us to stay in their home for 8 weeks!  Praise God for these people!

Anyway, this is just a quick update to where we are and why we are here.  We will update next week and discuss what happened at Kids For Christ Camp.  Till Then

For those who don’t know yet, Jen is pregnant with our second child due in December.  She is definitely feeling the pregnancy sicknesses and fatigue, and we are pretty busy this summer.  Pray for her as she finds the balance between being a mom, pregnant, and missionary all at once :) 

Please be in prayer for Jamen this summer as we are asking alot of him.  He really likes routine, and this summer we are going to be in-and-out of peoples homes, traveling long distances, and sleeping in a pack and play.  That’s alot to ask of a one year old.

Just a note on that, we are 4 days into this summer, and he is doing magnificent.  He is such a blessing.  But even still, we are praying for him daily and ask you to do the same.

I took four years of Spanish in high school.  My teachers all had degrees in teaching, and had lived in Spanish speaking countries.  Their classes were the best.  I passed all with a 4.0 average.  I loved the Spanish language.  I went out of my way to study more.  I decided back in 2003 that I wanted to go to Argentina to live for a year.  I figured I was ready. 

Day one in Argentina left me wide-eyed and drop-jawed at the fact that I could not communicate the simplist of things to my 7 roommates from different latin american countries.  The only thing I could do with confidence was ask where the restroom was.  While that was helpful it was not enough.  How could it be that after 4 years of dedicated spanish study at the high school level could I be so incapacitated by a lack of ability to actually speak the language?

Here at the Missionary Training Center, the trainers have seen it all too many times.  They have experienced it themselves.  It seems that somehow book-learning causes learners to come up short in ability to speak the language, which leads to frustration, and sometimes even quitting.  After seeing it over and over, it led us as a mission to explore an alternative to studying language the traditional method.  And it seems that scientists (or doctors) have figured out why.  It all has to do with how God made our brains to work.

It seems that there is a language "partition" in our brains.  What we know how to communicate to other people is stored in there.  Whenever we go to speak, our minds automatically go to this section of the brain to retrieve whatever is in there.  The interesting thing is that facts that we learn in school, such as history and science, are stored in another section of the brain.  You could call it the "information" section of the brain.  What happens is that when we study language as a bunch of grammar rules and vocabulary, our brains process the data as information, and rightly so.  The only way to get the language data from the information section of our brains into the communication section of our brains is to actually try to use the language we are trying to learn.

It’s a novel concept.  What do babies do?  The listen for months to the mom and dad talk (although some moms and dads dont talk to their kids at all, the just make the most ridiculous baby noises imaginable.  I wonder what babies think when we are making ridiculous baby noises at them?) without saying anything.  They just hear the language all day every day.  Eventually they start sputtering sounds, followed by words, followed by sentences, and before you know it they are fluent in the language.  No matter how hard a language, the kids always learn how to speak it within the same general time frame.

That’s our strategy to learning language.  When we first go into a new language setting, we wait for weeks or even months as we just simply listen to the language.  They say the longer you just listen without speaking, the less of a foreign accent you will have in the language.  Once we have "warmed up" to the language we begin the process of language learning but not in a classroom setting…we plan sessions of actually using the language.  One of our greatest tools in these learning sessions is a strategy called Total Physical Response.

Total Physical Response was not invented by New Tribes.  In fact, leading language software is already implimenting this idea of TPR.  Imagine a stack of 3 items on a table.  We, as language learners, would simply point to one of these objects and listen to our language helper tell us what the name of the object is.  We would continue pointing radomly at the 3 objects until we have heard enough.  Then we ask our language helper to say the names of the items in random order, and with each thing that our helper says, we have to try to point to the item.  First we point and listen, then we listen and point.  Once we have a handle on the 3 items, we add another one, then another and another, and next thing you know we have started learning a dozen new words. 

This whole time the vocabulary is being stored into the language section of our brains, because our body is involved and engaged in the learning process.  The data isn’t going into the information section of the brain.  The result is better language retention, faster learning, and a good ear for what the language sounds like.  We keep up this process for a long time learning nouns, verbs, adjectives and even small phrases.

This is what we are doing this week at the MTC.   We are learning how to plan and structure these sessions when we go overseas.  We are practicing with a Norwegian speaking language helper (yes, we are still going to Paraguay; no they do not speak Norwegian in Paraguay; this is just practicing on Norwegian) so that we can get a feel for the process.  In the picture above I am listening to our helper tell me phrases descibing the pictures on the board, and I am having to decide which picture she is talking about.  Really fun, and best of all…IT REALLY WORKS.  Learning another language is possible.

Just another glimpse into the practical side of the Missionary Training Center and how they are preparing us for tribal ministry in Paraguay.

Even though our second semester at the Missionary Training Center is winding down and we are gearing up for this summer, we have one last class here in Missouri that is of extreme importance.  The class is Culture and Language Acquisition Methodology.  (WOW, that sounds important huh?)  Or, in normal English, the class could be called:  When you show up in the tribe, how do you start learning how to communicate with the people and how do you find out what things are important to them and what things need to be analyzed.  This class is the "how" to function and get from the place of being an outsider in the village on day one, to be a functioning member of the community by the time you begin teaching.  (I think you get it)

The basis for learning language and culture is relationships.  This may seem obvious, but in all reality this is a fairly new strategy within the mission.  In the "old days" (even though some missionaries were relationship centered) the plan was get a little info from the village, study in your office really hard, and when you understand all your data, go get a little more.  The result was a missionary who was extremely lopsided in the office and not in the village, communicating to the people that they didn’t have time for them.  Culture was not experienced, and therefore not understood.  Teaching in this scenario only started after years and years of language study and sometimes was not well accepted because the relationships had been neglected.

When New Tribes Mission adopted this relationship centered approach to Culture and Language Acquisition, some shifts began happening.  Most notably language learning time was dramatically reduced.  It’s a novel concept, but basically the more time spent in the village listening and speaking with the people in the native language, the faster the language was learned.  Languages that in the past took our missionaries 5-7 years to learn were then being learned in 2-4.  There are some languages in the islands of Papua New Guinea that are now being learned in 1 year!  The Gospel getting out was accelerated.

But probably even more importantly, people have been more receptive to the gospel now that they perceive the missionaries to be friends and not foreigners.  Think about it:  would you believe a friend or a stranger if they told you something "outrageous"?  I would imagine your friend would hold greater sway.  It is no less true of unreached people groups.  While they are different in their culture from us, they are still people at the end of the day.  The words of a friend are powerful.

Center language study on relationships sounds good now, but when you start thinking about it practically you realize what a ride you are in for.  How many friends do you have that are non-Christians?  Not aquaintences…friends.  I would guess that our Christian friends greatly outnumber our non-Christian friends.  And how about people with whom you have nothing in common?  How many friends like that do you have?  I am talking about real 100% genuine friends.  If there is nothing or little in common it isn’t easy to have a friendship.  Unreached people groups, are by definition, non-Christian, and culturally they are very disimilar to our culture.  We are already burdened with the fact that we need God’s love to shine through us, because humanly speaking, our love isn’t going to be pure enough to have good relationships on the mission field. 

The Gospel being proclaimed depends on us loving those people.  How can we do it?  Only through Christ’s love being manifest in our lives can we expect to have genuine relationships.  You see, the "relationship centered" principle of our methodology is not simply relationships with the people themselves, it also includes our relationship with God, for that is the basis for all other relationships. 

"Where are you going when you die?"  This question is a common question that Christians ask people to get them to talk about spiritual things.  We know that the only way to get to heaven is through Jesus Christ.  He is the way, not a way.  This question can be very effective for evangelism here in the United States, because it is a question that people contemplate in our culture.  It hits a relevant nerve, and therefore can open up serious discussion.

Many people in our culture belong to formal religions.  This isn’t interesting until you consider that not everyone in the world belongs to a formal religion.  Many people in the world (and most tribal people) could be classified as belonging to what is known as a Folk Religion.  The main difference between formal religion and folk religion is the questions that people are asking, and therefore the answers that they are seeking.

In formal religion we seem to be primarily concerned with ultimate realities.  We want to know what happens when we die, what our purpose in life, where we originally came from, and what society is supposed to be like.  However we would be wrong to assume that these things are what tribal people are primarily concerned with.

In folk religion they are less concerned with ultimate realities and are primarily concerned with everyday issues.  A tribal person wants to know how to keep from getting sick more than he wants to know where he came from.  He wants to know how to make his crops grow more than he cares what his purpose in life is.  He wants to know more why people die than where they go when they do die.  They questions they are asking are completely different.

The reason that this is important is because we wrongly assume that they have the same concerns as us.  We go and teach them the gospel and then watch.  Sadly we see them "get saved" and quickly fall into what we perceive to be apathy.  It seems like they have no desire to grow as believers.  They quickly fall back into their paganistic ways while still claiming Jesus.  The problem is not apathy, it is we have made the gospel irrelevant to them.  We haven’t shown them how the Bible answers the questions that they have in life, and therefore they are going to find the answers elsewhere in their former ways.  We have with the best intentions inadvertently created a split level Christianity and without great efforts these believers won’t grow past infancy in Christ.

Paul Hiebert wrote in his superb book Understanding Folk Religion "Many (missionaries) study Scripture and theology but do not study the people."  This quote in not meant to devalue the Bible and theology, but rather to show that we have to know the people that we are ministering to.  Not understanding the difference between formal religious questions and folk religious questions is the reason for many failed church planting efforts.  It is interesting to note that both formal religious questions and folk religious questions are answered in the Bible.  They are both equally valid.  We still teach unreached people groups where they came from, their purpose in life, and about life after death, even though that is not their primary concern.  It is still important and they need to know the answers if they are to stand on a strong biblical foundation.  But we also address their questions as well since the Bible speaks to those as well and are equally important for growth.

The issue becomes foggy when unreached people groups have mixed their folk religious beliefs with Christianity or other religions, but that is too much to get into in this article.  It just goes to show that we as God’s minsters in this mission need to be careful students so we can make every human effort to make our message communicative.  Ultimately we look to our Father to cause understanding.  In the end we are dependent on Him for wisdom as wade through the mess that Satan has created among the lost people of this world.