The Next Step

We have officially graduated from the New Tribes Missionary Training Center in Missouri. As you know we have been planning for some time to go to South-East Africa and serve as church planters to those who have had no opportunity to hear about Christ. Our heart and desire is still very much for those people, but unfortunately we will not be going on as we had planned at this time.

We think it best, along with our home church, that we take some time off before moving on into full-time missions. Savvy and I met as students at the New Tribes Bible Institute, and we’ve just welcomed our brand new, little girl into the world this past October, but we’ve had little chance to be a normal family yet. In addition there are some needs that our families have that must be met before we can leave.

Our immediate plan is to get plugged back in at our home church in Wisconsin. We will be using this time to build up our family and serve in our church by putting into action all of the things that we have learned from our training.

We want you to know that, just as we said before, our hearts are still very much for the people of South-East Africa, and we hope that sometime in the near future we will still be able to go and work among those who do not yet have the hope of God. We can’t give a specific time frame, but we trust that God will work all things out in His timing.Thank you so much for the blessing you have been, and please continue to pray for us as we serve God there in Wisconsin until such a time as He sees fit for us to go.

As a note: we will keep this blog up, but won’t be updating it very regularly. If you like you may stay subscribed and we will update you when God shows us what the next steps along this path are.

It will be worth it…

As we become increasingly busy with the start of a new semester (right now we’re learning how to run a literacy program), it’s easy to be overwhelmed with even more school. But sometimes we get little reminders that help me remember that these years of preparation will all be worth it. Here’s one of those reminders.

Now that I have seen, I am responsible.

Those literacy classes will be so worth it when we see another minority people group can pick up and read God’s talk in their own language!

Take That, Eggplant

Eggplant. We can’t stand it. So when we read that eggplant is a staple in Southeast Africa, we both went “Uh-oh.” I’m not usually picky at all. I’ve tried and loved all sorts of different things (from crocodile to jellyfish), but when it comes to eggplant, I can’t get a grip! And when David brought home some eggplant that he got for free from the Farmer’s Market, I inwardly groaned (and maybe outwardly too. Ask David). He was eager to see if he “could make it taste good,” so I gladly stepped back in the kitchen this evening as David whipped up some Tanzanian foods. He made “Mchuzi wa Biringani” (eggplant curry recipe from here). And our Mchuzi wa Biringani is apparently supposed to be scooped into Chapati, which is like a flatbread. Or at least, that is what Google tells us. (If you’d like to try it, we got our Chapati recipe from here.).

A couple minutes ago, David brought me a bite of eggplant and tomato mixture from his freshly made pot of Mchuzi wa Biringani. My thought process went like this: Spicy. Warm. Eastern-ish. Delicious!  “MMMMmmmm! I like it!” I told my husband.

To which David replied, as he ambled back to the stove, “Take that, eggplant. You can’t ruin everything.” I guess we’ll find out if the food is really authentic when we get there. Or perhaps you’ve been there and can tell us (Note that the picture was taken before the yogurt was added). But until then, Baby and I can’t wait for dinner!

And quick update on us—we’re back in Missouri gearing up for another semester of training! More on that later. Thank you for your prayers and thoughts as we continue towards Southeast Africa!

School’s Out!

Welcome Summer!

Maybe you’ve been wondering, “What are David and Savvy up to this summer?” And many people have asked us, “How much longer are you guys in training?”It’s time for an update!

On Friday evening this week, we are packing up and driving up to Wisconsin for the rest of June and most of July. We can’t wait to get reconnected with our sending church after being away for the school year! So if you live in Wisconsin, call us! We’re there to spend time with you.

After that, it’s back to Missouri to get ready for our baby to come and to start another semester of school. Our school is very accomodating to moms so it looks like we can still graduate this December, then we’re staying at school until the Summer of ‘12 so David can get additional linguistics training. I’ll be a stay-at-home mom for the Spring semester, adjusting to having a new baby around and enjoying not being in school for the first time since we got married. This will be a hard semester for David (we’ve heard the Linguistics teachers give a lot of homework), so it’s good that I won’t have additional responsibilities. I can help him out as much as possible.

Have a great summer everyone, and we’d love to hear from you!

Missionary Kids and the Great Commission

Child abuse doesn’t happen in churches, does it? How about in missions? Some of us grew up with the mentality that such horrible things could never take place among such “good people.” Unfortunately, this mentality is too good to be true in the fallen world we live in. Every kind of abuse has taken place in the church and missions environment. For missionaries, there is a particular struggle with spiritually abusing their children through abandonment.

For decades, missionaries have struggled to balance family and ministry and give appropriate amounts of time to each. Some missionaries have abandoned their families altogether in the “call” to give their lives to missions. New Tribes, like many missions organizations, has a sad history of this—fathers and mothers sacrifice their God-given children on the altar of ministry. This should not be. How do those children see God after He supposedly called their parents to abandon them? Missionary kids have suffered for decades because of this spiritual abuse. And yet, Jesus honoured children. How can we do this better? God did not call us to hurt others when he calls us to love the world!

Our classes since we arrived here have been helpful to us, opening our eyes in ways we never imagined to family life in missions. We have been taught to not ask the question, “How do I balance family and ministry?” Instead, we have learned that family is ministry, and it’s our first God-given ministry. We should instead ask, “What is best for our children?” and if they want, “How can I involve them in my ministry?” How much better for children to know they are valued by their parents and God and to feel involved (again, if they want to be involved) in the important work of helping people to know God! Our MK Care and Education classes have given us many tools that we need and this will be especially important for us this coming October when our first child will be joining our family.

Please give us your wisdom: How does your family deal with this? It is not only a struggle for missionaries, as parents are often away at work, juggling things such as business in addition to raising children. Share your struggles with us so that we can learn from you!

In All Things

Have you ever been asked to do something that you felt entirely unprepared for? That’s exactly what I felt in class today. It wasn’t a test, a quiz, or some kind of complex project. It was just a simple Power Point presentation.

Our classroom

We had a guest speaker in “Field Health.” It’s a course designed to teach us how to stay healthy and treat basic diseases and injuries when we are days away from a doctor. Until today, most of the things we’ve covered have been foundations for living a healthy life: diet, exercise, drinking water, and other basics. I can handle those. Jogging and drinking water haven’t posed any problems for me yet. But this morning a doctor came to talk about skin diseases, lacerations, and burns.

As picture after picture flashed across the screen he would provide us with all the medical terminology, and then tell us how to treat the various conditions. And I became more and more worried. I had no idea how I was going to be able to do all of the things he was saying. It isn’t that it was difficult to understand; after all stitching is a fairly simple concept. It was the thought of actually doing it. I thought to myself:

“I can learn language and culture, I can study the Bible, present the gospel to a people that have never before heard of Jesus, and I can disciple the believers, but I don’t know about this. It’s disgusting! There are blisters, cuts, sores, boils, and everything else revolting you can imagine, and if I pass out I’ll be a laughing stock.”

It only took me a minute of thinking about this to realize how stupid that thought was. God is the reason why Savvy and I are going to people who have never head of Jesus. He is the reason we are going to learn a strange language and culture. He is the reason we study the Bible. It is His gospel that will be preached. It is His children that will be discipled, and here I am thinking, “I can’t do that. I might pass out and look stupid.” If He gives me the strength to teach His Word, He can also give me the strength to heal bodies that He designed. Please pray for Savvy and I as we learn to depend on God in all things, not just in the things that we think of as “spiritual.” Pray that we will do well in classes and retain the information we learn so that someday, we can bring the Gospel to the unreached of Southeast Africa.

 

Hope for Africa

As the list unrolled before our eyes, jaws in the classroom dropped. Page after page after page unrolled. And as my eyes skimmed the names on the page, beginning with the “A Che” people group in China (population 37,989) and ending with the “ Zyoba” people in Tanzania (population 3,481), I pictured the individuals it represents. It was a list of the world’s least-reached people groups, according the the Joshua Project, and let me tell you, it’s long. It represents over one third of the world, and each each number signified not a statistic, but souls. Souls in jeopardy.

Which people group would we be used to reach? What part of the world would we be most effective in? We’ve been asking these questions since our engagement, but this semester our search intensified. The list of the unreached is over 85 pages long, which leaves us too many choices to make. If I had more than one life to give, I would go to every single one of them. But unfortunately, I only have one. So where would it be?

I (Savvy) have felt a burden for Africa for several years now. I wasn’t sure if God would have me there or not, as I was willing to serve Him wherever I was needed. But the pain I’ve felt for Africa has overflowed into passion. Over my Thanksgiving break in 2009, I journaled these words:

“Africa is still barren, as she always has been. Will she always be barren, Father? Will you always curse this land? How long will disease and poverty and war characterize my home? When will the locust plagues stop, the child armies cease to exist? Will other people’s immorality forever kill children through AIDS? How many more orphans are there that I haven’t even seen?

And now I realize…You’re crying, too… Raise up a vision among your church for Africa, Father. May the glories she experiences in Heaven far outweigh her pain here on earth. Raise up people. I don’t know if You will send us or not, but send someone.”

A land of intense struggle and precious people (Tugela, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Spring 2008)

The start of the semester was a one week conference answering questions about the different fields. During this week, David seemed to catch the passion that I have long felt for Africa. He said he was starting to feel excited for the work that is going on there. I was overjoyed to hear him express his growing vision, and we began to pray together that God would make it obvious if we were not supposed to go to the region of Southeast Africa. We contacted our sending church’s mission board and asked for their insight. They sounded enthusiastic and on board with us. And after one semester of praying about this decision, we are ready to make the announcement that we are now aiming to be church planters in the region of Southeast Africa.  God is simply incredible.

I cannot describe what this means to me. It reminds me all over again of God’s unspeakable kindness to me. Not only do I have the privilege of being able to go to the unreached, but God is answering my heartfelt prayers by using me. He doesn’t just let me serve Him—He lets me serve where I want to serve. My cup overflows.

My feet, lovin’ their reunion with African soil (Tlokwe, Northwest Province, South Africa. November 2009)