Our vision for the future…
An obvious question that we are asked a lot is “where do you plan to serve?” Naturally if we are planning to do the work of tribal church planting, Bible translating, etc. we need to decide on a country to work in… with languages that do not have a Bible yet. Actually we cannot apply to any particular country until we have graduated from the training and applied for official membership with New Tribes Mission. However, recently, with the collected counsel and prayers of our home Pastor and elders as well as our friends that we hope to work with someday, Craig and Sara Noyes we started to ask questions to NTM leadership in different countries and find out information about the possibilities and pray! We made a decision in late April to head in the direction of Papua New Guinea. Lord willing, we would like to be in Papua New Guinea by the end of 2017 on the New Tribes base there, learning the national language (which helps us “get around” and communicate simply to the villagers we’ll be working with). That would be the first step… about a 9 month time period. By the end of learning the national language (which is a simpler one to learn) we would hope to have an idea of the tribe we’d like to work in and be heading there to build homes, settle in and begin learning the tribal language and culture to eventually teach them God’s Word for the first time! We are very excited to have a direction to be heading in which helps us make other decisions.
In the meanwhile, we will be graduating from the training here in December. We are praying about whether we finish our support raising after that or start support raising, take an advanced linguistics course in Missouri and then finish our support raising. The course would run from April to summer and then all fall until December of 2016.
What Have We Been Up To?
Paul and Ellen are working on finishing up their classes and preparing the family for a 6 week Jungle Camp practicum. The family will design and build a simple structure and live in it with the other families in training. It is a great opportunity to learn about field technology and family/ friend dynamics in an isolated environment (among other things). We are looking forward to some visitors in the next few weeks as well! The kids are also finishing up with school. There is a field day this week and other end-of-the-year fun events! If you would like to contact us during Jungle Camp… we can only receive LETTERS!!! Feel free to write us a snail mail letter. Our address is The Swensons c/o NTM Canada P.O. Box 707 Durham, ON N0G 1R0 CANADA Thanks!
Praise & Prayer:
- Craig and Sara Noyes
- Papua New Guinea!
- Jungle Camp
- Summer travel as we visit family, friends and churches