Planning for the Year

This past month has been rather different, in many good ways. We have gone to preach at and visit a different village each week and we will be at another village this weekend. After that, Seth will go to three different villages in the next three weekends. Two of those villages are a full-day hike, so Seth will be doing those trips with some young men who he is discipling. It is hard to balance discipleship, making lessons and teaching them in Bislama, while starting full-time language learning in Tiale. We are praying that God gives us the wisdom and discernment to meet the people’s needs both here in the present day, and in the future.

Hiking to Visit Other Villages

The last three weeks have been filled with preaching/visiting different villages, a youth conference in town, which was hosted by the Pinero Family and Frazer (Reach Vanuatu). We loaded up six trucks and brought well over 70 kids from our different villages (more than 8 of them), most of which were not saved and from places infiltrated with false religions. We emphasized the conference a lot so that we could hopefully impact our people as a whole, we even made it free for them to come so they had no excuses.

The youth we brought

Youth Conference

We have also had several meetings with the local pastors, building them up in their faith and helping them to strategize “how to” reach the full Tiale language/people group with the Gospel, while also building up the young churches. We have been trying to focus on training them in various aspects of truth, helping them stand strong in their belief against the false religions and animism, which are very prominent here. God continues to provide moment after moment to teach these men Biblical Truths. We praise God that He allows us to live amongst them and see what are their true needs.

Planning Meetings

The next three Sundays we will be in areas with “established” churches, the thrust of our ministry is to build them up through fellowship and the Scriptures. Seth will be preaching purposeful messages and teaching them about areas we know they need to understand more fully.

“The Plan”; we have every Sunday mapped out with those of us who are apt to teach. We are focusing on the four established churches, but also emphasizing three churches that we list as “need encouraging”, and then four villages as mission-focus. This averages out to having 1/3 of the year focused on maturing young churches, and then 2/3 on completely un-churched areas. 3 out of the 4 mission focus villages specifically invited us there to teach them about the Bible, 2 of them have offered to send young men to our Bible School and train them so they can be the future pastors of those areas. So exciting!

Sunday Mornings

We have definitely hit rainy season, it has rained non-stop for the past two days with typhoon (hurricane) warnings. Praise God our solar system is strong so we are not in need of power, and the really bad weather missed us (for now). The only challenging thing now is to find enough sun to dry our clothes. 🙂

We have been getting involved more in the community; helping people map out their homes and how to build them, assisting in the building of a library and classroom in the nearby school, helping work on a church being constructed, playing sports with the young men on Friday and Saturday nights (helping them stay in the village, instead of leaving to go get drunk on Kava). Nicole has been helping the ladies in various ways; whether it is simply being there and talking with them, holding babies, delivering baby blankets (Thank you to HBC knitting ministry!), helping out with planning the new ladies ministries, and helping at the local kindergarten. Every day seems to be full and long, but the weeks seem to go by very quickly.

Baby Blankets & Hats

They love Nicole’s hair!

Continues to pray for us, pray we stay healthy, focused, and balanced in all of our ministries. With the rainy season comes the humid season and it is definitely in full swing, we sure have felt it. Also, Seth currently has a rash covering up most of his back, he says it itches so severely that he hasn’t slept hardly at all for the past two nights. We covet your prayers, we need wisdom, we need the Holy Spirit to empower us, we need God’s Word to know how to do this job, we need our health so we can be effective. We depend on your daily prayers to help us accomplish this task for our Heavenly King.

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes