Catching The Vision

We have been in several churches already on this month-long trip. We recently participated in a church service that really impressed us. As missionaries going to the unreached people groups in Papua New Guinea, we were excited at what we saw. We walked in to the room with the walls scattered with cards. Each card had an unreached people group on it, a picture with the number of people in the people group, and their geographical location. There were thousands of them to give you a sense of being overwhelmed. That really strikes a cord with us. The pastor gave a brief message of how most missionaries are not sent to these unreached people. The guest missionary stood up and shared several statistics; that for every $100 we spend for full-time ministry, less than 1/10 of one penny is used to reach the unreached people of this world. Wow! If you do not like doing math here it is, for every $1,000 spent on ministry only $.01 (a penny) is used for reaching the unreached. The missionary gave an illustration (I will modify it a little) he pulled out a bag of candy, a bag of 1,000 pieces of candy. He divided the auditorium into 4 sections representing the world. ¼ the world claiming some form of Christianity, about ½ of the world has some form of the Bible (the unevangelized), this left ¼ of the auditorium representing the unreached people in the world. He walked back and forth shouting for joy to give candy to the “Christian” section and the unevangelized section. But every time he went to the unreached section (where we were sitting) he looked at them with discontent and walked away, showering candy on the other two sections. At the end he came to our section (the unreached) and asked us how we felt. Some people said “angry, upset, left-out, neglected, forgotten, hated, etc.” After the bag was almost empty he gave us the leftovers. This illustration hit us hard and we left even more encouraged about where God is leading us to serve.

We are sharing some of these things with you because they have impacted us, and we want to encourage you that there are people out there serving God at full force and that He is working through His people.

While we were at this church, we saw something else that was awesome. At each dinner table there was a box of supplies; cardboard, scissors, rope, aluminum foil, etc. for that table to build a tribal missionary house. We thought this was unique, seeing that we too will have to build our own house in the tribe. Each table had about 20 minutes (so not that much time) to build these houses. The missionaries then walked by each table to pick which one they would like to “live in”. We thought ours should have won, but oh well. This was inspiring because we saw young kids, and families getting involved and learning about missions, working together and trying to relate to the missionary.

We had the opportunity at this church to speak to the youth, and we saw it fit to dress up again in our PNG garb, we literally had to rush out of the service and take the tie off and put face paint and grass skirts on. We acted as tribal people, telling the kids about what we believed before the missionaries came to us and what we believe now after we heard “God’s talk”. The kids were very engaged, and asked really good questions. As we were heading back to get washed up, the pastor wanted us to go before the congregation and share our ministry with the church. It was a unique experience, to stand before a church dressed up with our faces painted and all…but as we know, always be ready :).

We are in Somerset NJ right now and just finished up a wonderful mission’s conference! God really blessed us through this church! We will be heading to Fort Scott Kansas tonight. It is about a 20-hour drive and that is just enough time to be there by Monday night for another mission’s conference. Please pray for our safety, our car, and our support team to grow. Every day we are reminded that there are 13 tribes in PNG right now asking for missionaries. This breaks our hearts; we have been trained, we are being sent, we just need to get to that goal of support. Pray that those tribes stay preserved until a missionary gets to them and present God’s Holy Word to them. As missionaries, we have heard it over and over; God uses death to motivate the living. Thank you for supporting us by reading our blog, we love and appreciate your partnership.

Building Tribal Homes

Speaking at Church

Unreached People Cards