unreached people groups

3 + 1 + 2 = 46

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As 2017 draws to a close, we want to express our gratitude to God for his faithfulness!

2017 began with Bill barely able to walk across a room (injury). The year ended with him going up and down stairs in Chihuahua Mexico (recovery!) And lot of great things happened in between.

While in Chihuahua, Bill spent a couple weeks teaching several missionaries how to learn the higher levels of language they need for effective ministry. One couple will soon use Spanish to train Mexican missionaries in a Bible school. The other couple will use the techniques Bill taught them as they work to become fluent in Nahuatl, the language of an Unreached People Group. As part of the process, Bill was also training one of our Ethnos360 language learning consultants in Mexico. There will probably be some follow-up trips to Mexico to continue this kind of training.

In January, we head back to the Asia Pacific region. We’ll be on an different island this time (unnamed for security reasons). Bill will be involved in 4 workshops, training those who help missionaries with their language learning.

Please pray for wisdom, a fruitful trip, and for safe and smooth travel.

Ah, yes, “Safe, smooth travel.” That brings us back to the title of this post, 3 + 1 +2 = 6. Granted, Bill is bad at math, but he’s not that bad. We were supposed to have a 6-hour trip from Tijuana to Chihuahua: two 2-to-3-hour legs, and one hour on the ground in Guadalajara. 6 hours. A comedy of errors conspired to make the trip last 46 hours!

So when we ask you to pray for safe and smooth travel, there really can be reason to pray. You can even pray that we actually even arrive at our destination!

We appreciate your partnership in this ministry and wish God’s richest blessings on your new year in 2018.

(If you would like to read a longer, blow-by-blow recounting of that whole crazy trip, The Long Trip)

Say What?

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How can missionaries break through walls of misunderstanding?

Everyone Needs to Hear!

We say this often. It’s our passion. This is what missions is all about: The unreached need to be reached with the Gospel. They need to hear the message of Christ.. and we believe they deserve to hear it in their heart language.

What Does “Hear” Really Mean?

If they misunderstand our message, have they “heard” it? If they reject it because we communicated poorly, have they really been evangelized? If they mix parts of God’s truth with their existing beliefs, have they been “reached”?

The answer to each question is No.

Culture is Important…

Language fluency is important. But it’s not enough! A big part of what Bill does is to help missionaries learn language and culture so that they can effectively communicate the gospel. Clearly. So it will be understood. So the Unreached can respond with faith to the truth of the Gospel. So they won’t simply put faith in their own misunderstanding of the Gospel.

Missionaries need to be able to get inside the head of their audience. We must understand what the Unreached believe… what they think—even their unconscious preconceptions—and most importantly, how might they misunderstand the Gospel.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Missionaries don’t study the culture in order to change the message to make it more palatable! We do not change the Gospel to make it fit the worldview of the audience. Rather, we learn the culture and worldview so that we know how the audience might misunderstand; how they might make the message fit their preconceptions. When we can anticipate how they will misunderstand, we can teach in a way which will avoid that… a way where God’s truth can be clearly understood.

We don’t change the Gospel; we want to see the Gospel–clearly communicated–change people’s thinking.

Recently, Bill took two trips to Ethnos360’s training center in Missouri to meet with others on his team as they develop the updated CLA (Culture & Language Acquisition) training materials for missionaries worldwide. The second set of meetings focused on helping missionaries gain insight into the worldview of their audience, and who to deal with potential misunderstanding of the Gospel message.

Health Update

This has been a year of doctor visits (32 and counting): ER, urgent care, doctors, ultrasounds, CT scans, an MRI, injections, physical therapy… whew! Since our last update, Bill has seen great progress in recovering from his pelvic bone/muscle injury. He spends hours each week faithfully following his physical therapist’s instructions, and that has made a big difference! He can walk around now without pain, and can even climb stairs. But he still needs to set some limits.

On top of all that, this week he has a kidney stone removal procedure (on September 14). Please pray for that to go well with no complications. Pray that it will not interfere with his teaching at Radius International the following week.

Upcoming Ministry

Updates coming soon on:

  • teaching at Radius International
  • development of culture/language learning software
  • a language consulting trip to Mexico in November
  • plans to revisit Asia Pacific in January

What Drives Us?

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If every Christian in the world shared Christ with every single person they knew… and all of those people believed, there would still be two billion people in the world who had never heard the gospel.

 

-David Platt (Cross 2015, paraphrased from one the testimony of one of our Radius students)

 

 

(sorry, but the video we shared in our last post suddenly became “private” and unable to be viewed)

Reaching the Unreached Next Door

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Punjabi Sikhs

 

sikh_man_agra_09

America (and California in particular) is home to many Punjabi immigrants who are members of the Sikh religion. Sikhs are not Hindus, and are often mistaken for Muslims because of their turbans and beards. Sikhism is a monotheistic religion which was founded in the 15th century in the Punjab region of India, and it is currently the 5th largest religion in the world, numbering around 30 million followers–more than all the Jews, Baha’is and Confucianists combined!

You have probably seen Punjabi people in your communities. If you are so fortunate, you have tasted their food (spicy and yummy!)

They live next door to us… yet as a people group, they remained unreached (~1% Christian).

Building Bridges

As we mentioned in a previous update, two churches in California have committed to reaching the huge Punjabi community in their city. The first step in reaching those nearly 40,000 Punjabi Sikhs is to build genuine relationships, to learn their language, and to understand them at a deep, heart-and-worldview level. The goal is to develop real, long-term relationships; not just “being-friendly-so-I-can-preach-at-you” relationships.

Punjabi woman

Baby Steps

Bill just returned from a follow-up trip to Central California where he and another consultant met with one of those churches to help them identify the most strategic neighborhoods and strategies, and to determine which of the many dialects of Punjabi would be the most effective for sharing about Christ.

Join the Team Through Prayer

Would you pray for the Punjabis to come to Christ? Pray also for those who face the challenge of learning the Punjabi language and building cross-cultural relationships.

And pray for Bill as he coaches them in their language learning.

Because everyone deserves to hear in their Heart Language.

 

Photos from Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported license: Yann (Punjabi man, 3.0 Unported license) and Raminder pal Singh (Punjabi woman, 2.0 Generic license.)