Author Archives: Stokingthefires

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

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! We love and miss you all, thank you for your partnership in the Gospel in the ministry God is doing through us here in Vanuatu.

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes

NL 12:17

We are not sure who prayed, but the Lord answered your prayer and then doubled it! We (Frazer and ourselves) just received a four year-visa! Which means we will have no problems for the next four years (in this area) 🙂 Praise God and thank you all!

We head up to the bush today, and then hopefully install our satellite next week, so hopefully you will hear from.

Love, Seth and Nicole Stokes

Hi there, just a quick prayer request: please pray for our visas along with our co-workers Frazer. We are heading to the capital for 2 days to hopefully secure the next 1-2 year visa… hopefully it’s 2 🙂

Once we are back we will head right back to the bush and will be there indefinitely for our first stent. We would greatly appreciate your prayers in the process for it to go smoothly along with the right people actually “being” in their office… that is a miracle only prayer can answer here in Vanuatu: Gods providence and YOUR prayers.

Thank you for your faithfulness to us and the ministry our Lord gave us. Your feet, Seth and Nicole.

Hello everyone!

In less than 20 days, Christmas will be upon us! We are sure more than one of you has an exact countdown till Christmas, including the hours 😉 We hope that you all are enjoying the Christmas season and cooler weather. This time of year is the hottest time here in Vanuatu, so enjoy the cool weather for us.  We are getting ready to spend a 3-4 month stent in the bush and will spend Christmas and the New Year with the Tiale people. Yes, that will be much different from last year where we were home in the USA. However, we are trying to focus on the Reason for the Season; Jesus, who came to earth to live and die for us, and it is because of what He did in His short life, that we are compelled to do what we are doing. This truth helps keep the perspective when we begin to miss our families during the “Christmas/holidays in America”. We hope and pray that this Christmas you and your family are able to pull away from the busyness of your respective culture and re-focus on why we celebrate this special time; and how that (He) impacts the rest of our year/ life. It is because of the birth of our Saviour that we have hope in this life! We greatly love, appreciate, and miss you all! Your part in our ministry is vital; we cannot do this massive task without YOU! Thank you for allowing us to be an extension of YOU here in Vanuatu. Click the link below to read our latest newsletter.

November-Newsletter-2017

Thanksgiving meal with our ex-pat friends from Reach Vanuatu

Your Feet to the Tiale people in Vanuatu,

Seth & Nicole Stokes

How do we express all of the things that it took to get us to this point? Do we start with our families and influences that led to our late-teen years and making the decision to follow God into missions? Do we talk about our collegiate years and what God did to mold us through that time? Do we contemplate the unique circumstances of how we met and got married, pursuing missions as individuals and then as a married couple in training? Or how about how God miraculously provided the amazing support team to get us overseas? Reflecting upon the time our home church made the prayerful decision of us going from Indonesia, to PNG, to now Vanuatu? Or do we just focus on the supernatural way God showed us the people to work with, the Tiale people, within the first week of arriving in this country…?

That is a lot of questions… we did not even scratch the surface of the emotional roller coaster that this year has been, leaving our family, friends, and churches again… a doctor telling us Nicole might die, to then her being healthy again! Just to shortly transition into the house-building phase; hosting teams come for 5 weeks straight, and then for the past 2 months we finished up things inside the house while preaching weekly and doing discipleship with some of the pastors and pastors in training. We had an amazing ceremony that will be talked about amongst our people for decades; hundreds of people came from over eights villages, all excited for the chance of having a full-time missionary working with them in their need of a Bible and discipleship.

So many things to talk about… over a decade in the making, and now things begin. We are in town trying to finalize things with our one, or possibly two-year visa, please pray for that. And with being so remote, we purchased a satellite so we can stay in touch with the outside world, it should arrive on our island this coming Tuesday. Literally the local cell phone service has not worked for 2 weeks in the past month, and with safety being a priority, that is why we went this route. It was an unexpected expense but well worth it long-term.

And now it begins… no more training… no more schooling… no more transition phase or house-building phase… now we begin the arduous work of learning the Tiale Language. To be an effective Bible Translator, you have to know the language, you have to know the culture and worldview in which the people look through and interpret everything. All the major mission groups and training centers in the world put such an emphasis on this process. We cannot westernize the procedure and “McDonalds” it, go through the fast-lane and get an unhealthy meal. We have to go to the garden, till the ground, grow the food, wait for the process to come to maturity, harvest it and then cook the delicious meal of speaking and thinking in a pre-literate society (unreached people group). This is not an easy or quick process, but we have to learn their language and culture to do an effective translation. God spent over a millennia compiling and writing the Scriptures, we ought to do our due diligence and translate the Bible effectively. We say all of that because we know many people have and will ask, “how long will it take”? The answer is… we don’t know. We are not promised tomorrow and we have never learned an unwritten language before, we have learned two languages together as a couple, both with much help and both being on paper already, and that is why we need YOUR prayer. It is a daunting task, humbling yet terrifying, we are solely putting our trust in God and not our abilities to do this task. Its too big of a job for us to do, we need Him to do it for us. Some people learn a language in one year… others in much longer. Some people have done a New Testament in eight years… others in forty. This is a long-term commitment and it is our privilege to be YOUR feet and HIS witness here in the Tiale territory. So if you are curious our want to ask… “how long”, our answer will be 9-48 years :).

Overall we are doing well, we had some time to recover from the busy house-building phase, and we do miss our families during this Christmas and holiday season. But we are getting focused because once we move in this time we don’t plan on coming out to town for 3-4 months… we are hoping to make some good head-way into language learning by that time. We could really use your prayers and encouragement during this time.

We are truly grateful for your faithfulness to us and the ministry our Risen Lord has given to us. We hope that you had a Happy Thanksgiving and have a Merry Christmas. Please pray for us as we begin this new phase in our lives.

Your feet to the unreached,

Seth and Nicole Stokes

Below you will find a link of a video walk through of our house in the bush. We wanted you all to have a better view of the house. Hope you enjoy it!

https://youtu.be/Z5f-PaM-ktY

Your feet in Vanuatu,

Seth & Nicole Stokes

So what does the inside of our house look like? You may have been wondering. We finally finished working on cabinets, painting, flooring, etc. and decorating it inside and are now ready for the big reveal! We just got to town and will write more updates later on but for now here are some pictures of our house. 

Utility room/solar system “brains”

Guest bedroom

Guest bedroom 2

NL 7-10:17 PDF

Here is our latest Newsletter!

Where do we begin? We know! THANK YOU! Thank you to everyone who gave of themselves in prayer, finances, and coming here to Vanuatu. We seriously could not have done it without you. We know everyone played a part, many individuals and churches backing us, but we would like to give a special thanks to five churches in particular; Harvest Baptist, Bethel Memorial, Journey Christian, Bethel Community and Noblesville Baptist. We are grateful for ALL of you, these five churches in particular blessed us tremendously and we are closing the final pages of this chapter tired yet encouraged thanks to YOU!

Many of you know that September was a month where we hosted three teams back-to-back, it was a flurry of events, picking them up from the airport and driving them straight to the bush, only to start working the next day. It was hard on them and us, we felt badly because we didn’t get to do too many “fun things” with them per se, and it definitely was a work-trip for them all, but each team assured us day in and day out that the choice of working so hard was their decision, and it was their blessing to do so. We never felt worthy of such dedication and love, but we worked alongside them every step of the way. It got to the point where some teams would take 5-10 minute meal breaks, work from 4am-8pm… and by God’s grace, your prayers, and their dedication, the house was closed off by the time team 3 left.

October was a month where Nicole and I began the process of making it a “home”, flooring, painting, staining, double checking most things, constant struggle with water fittings, caulking almost every inch of the house, and then started with putting furniture in it and officially “slept” in our house October 23^rd for the first time. We are not going to lie… we were pretty wiped from all of that. We had our “house-opening ceremony” and then started emptying our residence in town. We have about one more “load “ of things in town and we are moved out for good. We took time off from house-building periodically to make sure the people knew we were there; by just walking through the village, sitting down and connecting with family units, walking to nearby villages, and of course Seth has preached almost every week, if not two times a week. We even hosted two local families already in our house for a meal and fellowship.

Seth and the pig

We plan on leaving today and trying our first “dry run” in the bush for the next 3 weeks. We have running water, and even a washing machine (limited water of course), after that we plan on being in the bush for 3-4 months. We tried several options and are going down the route for a satellite; we need to have good internet service to stay connected with you all. It was not a “planned” expenditure start-up wise, but God is always faithful. So hopefully that comes in the next 2-3 weeks so we can install that and stay better connected with you all.

Seth, his brother, and his uncle

And now… time to share about the ceremony. We finished up the inside, and then the Tiale people began to decorate the outside, planting certain trees, some with meaning, others just for mere “beautification”. We had invited well over 8 villages to the event, more than one language group, several chiefs, some government officials, missionaries from town, and a missionary family from a sister language group. Giving each group a part in the ceremony to make the event a cohesive and very purposeful event. The people were so excited, the translation project has been dream of theirs for almost 2 decades, during which two different missionary families came and left in that time. They are seeking help for the Bible school, the pastors are wanting to be better equipped, and they have never done a ceremony to “kick-off” this event before, in particular they have never announced to the other/rest of the villages this is starting and is for them as well. We are so thankful God gave us wisdom and foresight to plan some things in advance; Pastor Gabriel and Chief Basil took this event seriously, we held several meetings to make sure it went smoothly, purposefully, and prayerfully. We even added some ceremonial things to show appreciation and respect to emphasize their culture.

Nicole and her mother

It was a long/short day, we started off with Seth sitting on a bag of rice… a pig was tied to a post next to him, and then a series of men who Seth calls “dad or uncle” culturally, began to cut and shave parts of Seth’s beard, and then do the same to the pig next to him. The pig is tied intrinsically to the ceremony, his life is to be offered as part of the ceremony, immediately the pig is taken away and killed to be cooked for the meal. This was done to show respect to their culture, as if Seth “grew up as a Tiale person”, and much more, many came to watch the event because they’ve never seen a white guy do this. They were all excited and encouraged that this occurred, afterwards a series of speeches were given by chiefs, pastors, a government official, Jeremy Pinero, and Adam Pike. The speeches really emphasized the people to be encouraged, this process has started, be patient it will take many years, and once received it will be a blessing for an eternity. Much more was said but for the sake of brevity, we are trying to keep it short. The ribbon was cut, the door was unlocked, and then the house was flooded with close to 300 people. Everyone passed through each room with curiosity to see how a “white-man” lives, people were confused and laughed to see a toilet inside their house, but all in all they caught the vision… this is not some bamboo made house like theirs, this is not some temporary shelter, this is big house built to last for decades… they saw the intent and understand we are here for long term. They are excited to have someone here to live amongst them, learn their language, live life on life with them, trying to understand their worldview and culture, it was a day they so looked forward to, if you see the pictures we hope you see their excitement.

Us in our get-up

We hung around for the rest of the day with the people, ate some food, laughed, sighed a relief of its over, brought our blow up mattress in OUR HOUSE, and slept in our house for the first time… we could here some of the leftover crowd chatting away still until after 9pm.

We could not have done this with you, our supporting churches and the Tiale people, this was 2 months of hard work, but it’s done. We will spend these next 3 weeks; connecting, furnishing, making a routine, and getting ready to do this full-time. Pray for us in our transitions, our bodies are tired but our spirits are wanting. Thank you for praying for Seth, his lymph node reduced a little bit this past week, continue to pray for us to have wisdom and discernment in how to proceed. And last but not least, now that we have a house, we can invite you to be our guest.

We love and appreciate you all, your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes