Why Missions? Why Us? Why are we training missionaries?
The first question has an obvious answer. It’s our job as believers to pass on to others the Truth of God’s Word and the message of salvation. Where we do that is just the geographics, but the fact is that we should be doing that where ever we are.
Randy and I have always been interested in listening to missionaries and we believed that it was our job to share the Truth we knew with others but that’s where the story of how we got involved with New Tribes Mission, reaching tribal people and training missionaries begins… We were in our mid 30’s and living an average American lifestyle in NE Washington (although we had 4 children at the time which is more than the 2.5 average). God brought some circumstances into our lives that started to shake things up. Randy was seriously injured logging and was off work for 9 months, the house we had lived in for 7 years was sold and we couldn’t find a place to live. About this time we also had our 5th child. You might think that with all that going on it was a strange time to make huge changes in our life but God was working through all of these things and working on our hearts as well. We decided that we wanted to step out and serve God in some full time way but we thought that it would be good to have some in depth Bible training first. So… we begin checking out all the Christian / Bible colleges in the US. We had some pretty limiting criteria- we wanted only Bible classes, they had to take large families and it had to be reasonably priced. We only found a few that met those qualifications and New Tribes Bible Institute was one of them. After much thinking, praying and talking (with each other, our children, people we respected and our church) we made the decision to go for it.
So, we loaded up and moved sight unseen to Wisconsin and began an incredible, life changing adventure. We learned so much in classes everyday and then from homework-straight from God’s Word (what an opportunity). One thing that we learned that neither one of us was aware of was that there are still millions of people who have never heard the Word of God because there is no one who speaks their language to tell them. That was really eye opening to us. We saw that God could have taken us to any Bible school but he brought us to New Tribes and showed us some huge needs and the next step was ours.
We made the decision to become missionaries with NTM , which meant completing their missions training/language courses (which we did over the following 3 years). Then it was time to choose where we would go (where we felt God would have us minister and where the abilities He had given us would be of the best use).
That brings us to question #3. Why are we training missionaries?
When we finished our training we were asked if we would consider working on staff at one of the NTM missionary training centers. So what would you think? Probably some of the same things we thought……..what about all those tribal people, will we be "real" missionaries, is it worth while and the BIGGEST question-what does God want us to do?
Well, what we concluded 10 years ago is what we still believe with our whole hearts today.
1)What about those tribes? For all those tribal people to be reached SOMEONE has to help train and prepare the missionaries to effectively reach out in a language and culture very different from their own.
2) Would we be "REAL" missionaries? All of NTM missionaries whether home staff, training staff, tribal or support workers are ALL in this together and are ALL faith based and faith supported by churches and individuals. Training missionaries is our full time service to God and we have had the privilege of helping prepare several hundred missionaries in the last 10 years.
3) Is this what God wants for us? I guess I already answered that when I said we did and still do believe this is exactly what God prepared us for. He gave us different skills and life experiences so we could pass those on to future missionaries and help them be more prepared for what they will face as they go into their ministries around the world.
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