NTM

Here’s a little bit about us..

Steve and I during our days at Bible School

Steve and I met at New Tribes Bible Institute in Michigan.  We both felt that God had called us to Bible School to spend time seriously studying the Word and to learn about His desire to see all the nations come to know Him.

Steve was raised in a Christian home and was saved at a young age.  He grew up in church and going to youth groups, but it wasn’t until the age of seventeen that he was convicted at a missions conference about living a “double life” and not being serious about His relationship with the Lord.  He started looking into Bible School and choose to come to Michigan from Pennsylvania to attend NTBI.

I (Casey) grew up going to church, but didn’t really understand what it meant to have a personal relationship with Christ.  My parents were married in my teens and they faced the challenge of blending a family.  We began attending a great church, but there were a lot of circumstances that kept me from searching out a relationship with Christ.  My freshman year in college I finally made him my personal Savior.  After a summer serving at a Christian camp, I decided to look into Bible Schools and started NTBI.

Steve, Micah and I in Missouri while going through the training with NTM.

After two years of Bible School, we decided to continue on with our training with New Tribes Mission to become overseas missionaries. We went through one year of training in practical living overseas – including a course where we built a home in the woods and lived there briefly!  We also had over a year of language training.  We studied about how to learn different languages, how to break them down and analyze them, literacy – a multitude of things that we needed to know.  New Tribes Mission works with remote people groups where most of the languages have never been written down.

While going through the training, we were blessed with two beautiful boys, Micah and Malachi.  As we finished up the training, we prepared to move to Papua New Guinea (an island just off Australia).

We spent a year living in Papua New Guinea learning the trade language there and helping with different support ministries.  We enjoyed being a part of the team there and were planning on moving into a tribe there when we were led to come home for medical reasons.  Upon coming home we learned that we were expecting our son, Ephraim.

Steve learning language in Papua New Guinea

As we prepared for his arrival and adjusted to our new life with our three boys we went on staff at the same Bible School that we had studied at ourselves.  We enjoyed our time there and investing in the lives of the students there.  We always knew that it was a temporary ministry for us and after two years we felt God leading us to visit the field of Guinea, W. Africa.

All of us at New Tribes Bible Institute where we were on staff.

We took a month long trip to Guinea to visit friends and see if this is where God would have our family to move.  It was a very challenging month to say the least with three little boys and so much traveling, but we enjoyed visiting the different tribal locations and hearing about the work in Guinea.  We came home from the trip and begin making plans to return permanantly.  We packed up our house and moved to Quebec, Canada to begin full time French study since French is the national language of Guinea.

Our family outside our new home in Canada

We spent a year in Quebec studying French.  We went to Canada not being able to speak even a few words of French and were so excited to see progress so quickly.  Our boys even picked up a lot of French while we were there.  We spent a few months after our time in Canada preparing to move our family overseas.

We have now been here in Guinea for a little over a year.  Our first year was primarily a time for us to live closely with a Guinean family and learn culture from them and through other people around us.  We began to develop friendships within the community and began to learn how to handle different situations that came up.  We lived next door to our host family and spent the majority of our time just watching and learning from them.

Our family celebrating Christmas with our host family and some of our friends here in Guinea.

We have recently moved to the mission center here in Guinea and are enjoying stepping into our various roles here.  We are so excited to be developing relationships with the people in our village.  We pray that we would use these friendships to bring God glory and to be a witness for him among the people here.  Read our blog posts to learn more about what we’re up to on a day to day basis.