Tears, Joy, and Understanding

Time flies by, day in and day out. Between teaching the pastors in training, discipling the established pastors, language learning, community life, constant daily grind of living in a jungle, we would like to share how things are going… so for the sake of brevity, we will try to condense it down for you all.

Nicole has started a women’s Bible study with a handful of women, mostly younger women who are interested in ministry, but one lady is married to a pastor in training. It is a very exciting time since there has never been anything for the women here in Tiale land. The ladies have a time of prayer, games, snacks, and Bible study; they are currently going through the Foundational Bible Teaching. This is being done in Bislama.

Ladies Bible Study-First Puzzle for Them!

Spending time together

We find ourselves constantly trying to fill the needs for today along with looking to the future. What we mean is, we are constantly learning their culture and the Tiale language, which will produce fruit in hopefully 2019 sometime, Lord-willing. But we are also trying to fulfill all felt needs of their today. There are some who are saved and desire to grow and are also versed in the national language of Bislama, so we are currently able to disciple and train them. Babes need milk to drink and children need solid food, so our goal is to give each group their personal need.

Teaching the Youth at the local School

Seth is the busiest he has ever been along with the happiest. He is currently training 4 men on how to use God’s Word; he is using the Foundational Bible Teaching study and applying it to their daily lives, teaching them basic hermeneutic principles, as well as a homiletics (because he gives them lessons to teach) course. Sometimes we walk around seeing them huddled together, reading Scripture together, hearing them practice preaching, truly it is a joyous thing for us to see and witness!

Singing the New Tiale Songs at Church

We have also had to shed some tears, there have been some incidents in the village and we have had to enact church discipline in several cases. It brings a strange joy in the midst of the tears because you can see God working to make these young believers stand more firm in their belief. We had to put several people on church discipline in the past month. Satan is trying to win this fight, but through God’s grace and your prayers he will not prevail. One of the pastors literally said, “If you were not here I would not be bold in my belief, I have always wanted to be more bold and impose discipline on sin, but I always feel alone and with no back-up, you encourage me and empower me to stand firm in my Christian walk”. And that is the real reason why we are here, to point people to God and His Word as the true absolute for their every day lives. If we miss that, we miss the reason for being here. Pray for the Tiale people, even though they have had the Gospel for quite sometime, they are Christians still in infancy. But it is amazing to see their desire for more. We will share more about that in the upcoming blogs.

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes