NTM

I asked a tribal group where I’d gone for a workshop, “When you think, to yourself, what language do you think in, in Embera (their tribal language), or in Spanish?” 30 out of 32 responded, in Embera. And this is despite the fact that they are literate in Spanish (at least in an elementary way). This illustrates to us the importance of mother-tongue reading education for ethnic minorities. When we want to plant a church, communicating the eternal gospel through God’s Word, by far and away the greatest impact will be in the language of the people’s heart. Dressed in local vocabulary, and bridged with cultural concepts, the life-transforming message will get through with greater clarity and hopefully no distortion. As the church is established, personal access of every one of its members to the Scriptures through reading education enables their discipleship, growth and involvement.

God gave me the joy of facilitating such reading education programs in the field of Panama for over 16 years, supporting the missionary teams to the tribes on location in 5 of its tribes. Now He’s giving me a chance to train up more such facilitators throughout New Tribes’ Latin America region. I may still have a couple training projects yet to pursue in Panama, but those will be for a later time. The Lord will have to make those arrangements.

New Tribes’ mandate is to see Jesus’ Church extending itself from us the sending churches to partner with national churches in the fields and continuing to plant and nurture to maturity churches in the ethnic minorities. Central to this broad goal is the entrance and availability of God’s Word. I will be involved specifically in training reading program consultants for each of New Tribes’ 6 Latin America fields, to basically do what I have done for the tribal works there in Panama–help with the development of reading program curriculum.  My new team, the LCT, would like me to travel a lot with consultant trainees into tribes, especially at the time of the development of their tribal reading curricula, and I’ll also provide them all with helpful resources. I love getting into the tribes–really hard on this not-so-young body, but worth it. And thanks to many friends who pitched in, my latest portable computer will be serving along with me.

Also, in order to help us evaluate whether we’re accomplishing our goals of mature churches full of literate members and to know where to provide more help and resources, I’ll be collecting statistics on the kinds of literature available for each tribe.

Besides that, we have missionary training institutes in four of our Latin American fields. It’s possible that I’ll train or help the institute staff in our four centers to teach the 20-30 hour literacy segments of their training courses, starting in November next year. You may remember that I’ve had the delight of doing this in each of these countries before. Some field staff and I will probably teach the next round of training modules in the next 1 to 3 years, then I’ll turn that job over to them.

Come December 27, I plan to travel to our USA headquarters in Florida to meet with my new team, the Latin America Coordinating Team (LCT) and the International Literacy Coordinators. They’ll fill me in a bit on the team’s expectations for my new ministry, and we’ll get some tutoring together on one of the mission’s language/culture learning tools. Then, Lord willing, I’ll fly on down to Paraguay on January 14 to my new location in the capital, Asuncion. That will be the home point out of which I will be flying commercially to all points in the region. I have already made a couple of short ministry trips to Paraguay in 2000 and in 2002. These “previews” made leaving my comfort zone in Panama easier. I’m eager to return to Paraguay and resume the relationships.

New Tribes is currently serving in 5 Paraguayan tribes–Ayore, Manjui, Nivacle, Sanapana and Pai Tavy Tera–and hoping to extend to 7 more. The cost of renting in Asuncion and the cost of flights is greater than what I was getting by on in Panama, and I will be flying more in the days ahead.

Though I lamented leaving my loved ones in Panama, the familiar, and starting all over again with relationships and worldly goods–it’s hard enough doing it the first time when you’re young and energetic–still God has been so good to me so far that I trust Him with the changes. And as I start anew, I expect to see more of His strength in my weakness and more of His glory in this vessel of clay. Your petitions to our Father for me will surely be of inestimable impact in the years(?) ahead. Thanks for this partnership with me.