Make Your Choice

For the past year, the presidential election has hardly been out of the news. Finally, the day has come to make a choice between the republican and democratic messages. Every eligible US citizen has the right to vote. Whether they do our not is again a matter of choice.

Far from the White House in Washington are millions of men and women that have no choice. Its not just that they don’t have the choice to vote for one or other of the presidential candidates. They don’t have the choice to believe a message that is a matter of life and death, the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They have no choice because they have never heard.

Some 10,000 people groups have yet to hear of Jesus Christ, 3,000 of these are tribal peoples. These are the people groups that NTM have been focusing on for the past fifty years. Over the course of these fifty years, NTM has developed training to prepare men and women to tackle the specific issues involved in planting churches among tribal peoples.

Needless to say, the first phase of training is Biblical. There are two big reasons for this. First, the Bible is the primary tool in planting churches. It is the Bible that is the word of life. Second, missionaries not only need to know about the Bible but have learned to apply the Word of God in their daily walk with God. The goal is to equip believers to interpret and apply the foundational truths of the Bible.

The next phase of training equips men and women with practical helps in culture and language acquisition, principles of literacy and translation and methods of church planting including how to teach the Bible to those who have never heard. The training answers the question, where do you start to plant a church among tribal people.

The goal of trainer and trainee are one. Every church that is established, every group of believers that is discipled and given the scriptures in their own language is not just the work of one or two individuals. It is the work of a team seeking to bring the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ to tribal people so they too have the choice to believe and be saved.

NTM only exists because the church has been commissioned by God to make disciples of all people groups. NTM is a response by the church to adequately equip and sustain its men and women in fulfilling this commission among the tribal peoples of the world. Ultimately, NTM is God fulfilling his promise to bless all people groups. He wants to give every man and woman the choice to believe.