{"id":627,"date":"2021-05-18T16:08:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T20:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/?p=627"},"modified":"2021-09-02T16:31:26","modified_gmt":"2021-09-02T20:31:26","slug":"in-person-team-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/2021\/05\/18\/in-person-team-meetings\/","title":{"rendered":"In-person team meetings!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Give thanks to the Lord with us that we were able to get together in person last month for our annual Spanish Language Resources Team Meetings. Due to the Covid-19 response measures, it had been two years since we’d met last.

We\u2019re not a big team, in fact this\u00a0photo is a bit deceptive. Only Duff and I are full time, Jim is half-time and Jerry is our supervisor. He and his wife, Joyce, are the International Literacy Consultant Coordinators, but he provides our team with a bit of oversight and lots of encouragement.



Betty, on the far right, heads up the Portuguese Language Resources team. They sat in with us because we share the\u00a0region and a similar\u00a0ministry.\u00a0Her husband, Tim, was our team supervisor before Jerry. They worked with a people group in Bolivia in their younger years and still help out that tribal church, as well as doing church-planting consulting and helping train Latin American missionary candidates.

Interesting note — we\u2019re nearly all MK\u2019s (missionary kids). Jim and Tim grew up in Bolivia, Betty in Brazil, Duff in the Philippines and I in South America. Jerry is from Ohio. \ud83d\ude0a

Thanks to our newly-acquired video-conferencing skills, our regional director, Juan Horta, was able to sit in virtually from Colombia for the morning sessions. We also\u00a0had an hour-long visit with Martha Torres, who contributes what she can as she struggles\u00a0with the long-term effects of a stroke.
\u00a0
One of the major topics of our meetings this year was the development of the\u00a0new generation of our mission\u2019s Culture and Language Acquisition (CLA) program, named \u201cEngage<\/strong>,\u201d along with an accompanying smartphone app called \u201cStages<\/strong>.\u201d

The app,\u00a0which is already\u00a0in Beta testing,\u00a0is an amazing\u00a0data-gathering tool<\/strong> \u2013 for recording language, taking pictures and videos \u2013 and a powerful organizer<\/strong>, helping our church planters track the tasks they\u2019ve accomplished and reminding them of what they need to do next<\/strong> in order to learn the people\u2019s language and understand their cultural worldview.

It will be our team\u2019s job to translate into Spanish the manuals and the software text for both \u201cEngage\u201d and \u201cStages\u201d<\/strong> so that our Latin American co-workers can use these tools in their ministry of cross-cultural church planting.

I won\u2019t bore you with all the topics we covered in two-and-a-half days of meetings (although I could, since I took many pages of notes). Suffice it to say that, once again, it was\u00a0a big morale boost to learn of the opportunities that lie ahead and to\u00a0look back on the road we\u00b4ve traveled by God’s enabling grace.

Thank you so much for your faithful and loving support of our efforts\u00a0to provide valuable resource materials to help equip\u00a0our Spanish-speaking\u00a0ministry partners.

Your partners\u00a0in His service,

Steve & Eida Irwin<\/strong><\/em>
Ethnos360.org
Spanish Language Resources
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Give thanks to the Lord with us that we were able to get together in person last month for our annual Spanish Language Resources Team Meetings. Due to the Covid-19 response measures, it had been two years since we’d met last. We\u2019re not a big team, in fact this\u00a0photo is a bit deceptive. Only Duff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/steve-irwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}