NTM Missionary Training Center property in Missouri
People have asked us why we decided to become part of New Tribes Mission. If you’re at all familiar with the missionary world, you know that there are A LOT of missionary organizations out there. Some focus on specific parts of the world, some operate within a certain denomination, some specialize in clearly defined areas of missionary work… they may have different goals, requirements, methodology… and they may or may not require some kind of training.
Several years ago, John and I were close to being done with our college education and started taking our dream of becoming missionaries more seriously… do we really want to do this? Do we really know what that means for our lives (the answer to that question is still “no” but we’re getting closer to figuring it out 🙂 )? We also had been married for about four years then and had not been able to have any children, which we saw as a painful, challenging, but clear sign from God to move ahead with our plans to enter the mission field. So the search for “our” mission organization began.
We met with representatives, went to mission conventions, took classes on the world mission movement… and ended up with three organizations we were interested in: Wycliffe, Africa Inland Mission, and New Tribes Mission (NTM). At first, the training required for NTM scared us off — we just wanted to GO and not spend more years in school preparing to go. But over time God changed our hearts and we realized that we needed training. Because we didn’t know how to start learning a language that didn’t have any writing system. Because we didn’t know how to communicate cross-culturally with people we seem completely strange to. Because we didn’t know how to tell someone about Jesus who has never heard his name before.
The NTM Missionary Training Center was one of the major reasons why we felt called to NTM in the end. Besides that, we also felt very drawn to their methodology and basic doctrinal beliefs. So here we are now, ready to start our time of learning, growing, and more searching! If you want to know more about NTM, check out their website: www.ntm.org. And here’s a short video about the Training Center in Missouri: