Why Read?

The Importance of Literacy…

Imagine your life for one day without the ability to read.  More importantly… where would your relationship with the Lord be if you could not read your Bible and no one around you could either?  As our final semester of training begins, we are looking into the importance of literacy to young tribal churches.  As you know, we plan to work in a tribe in Papua New Guinea and teach them what God’s Word says and, one day, be training up the young believers.   However, we cannot teach these people forever.  In fact, our goal would be to leave an indigenous church that is self-sustainable apart from western help.  Our ministry will eventually end.  Even though these tribal groups typically depend on oral stories, these stories change with time and the generations… oral traditions are not dependable enough for God’s Word.  AND there is MUCH to learn in God’s Word.  The tribal people that we will go to minister to need to be able to read and understand the Bible for themselves and their leaders will one day need to be able to teach from God’s Word.  Missionaries will one day leave, but the Bible will stay with them.  We know that God’s Word is powerful and the people we go to work with will need to learn to read it.  This semester has started with our learning how to teach literacy to adults and children who have never read before in their own language.  Currently, we are practicing writing basic reading primers in a fictitious language as practice for doing this one day for real!  We will be teaching literacy AFTER we’ve learned their language… because we will be teaching them to read in their language.  Later this semester we will be practicing learning a language… with a language helper to tutor us.  We do not know what language we will train on yet but it will be for practicing the procedure of learning a language effectively and efficiently.

What Have We Been Up To?

We just finished a wonderful summer of visiting churches and friends in Ohio, Indiana and a little of Michigan.  We look forward to how God will raise up our support team and thankful for how God has already been at work building our team.  We have also received GREAT news!  Emmanuella’s hepatitis B is in a very dormant (almost undetectable) state which could very likely last her entire life!  Praise the LORD!

Prayer Requests:

• Craig and Sara Noyes
• Finishing the training well
• Papua New Guinea 
• Direction as we set up our schedule for 2016