What types of food do you eat for special holidays? Mashed root foods are a must. This style with Taro is very common and everyone loves it. Better get some before it’s gone…

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your families (if the Lord allowed).

Many of you have asked what we did for Christmas or how our Christmas went… we hope this helps give you a glimpse of what Christmas was like for us this year…

Christmas (and New Year is celebrated the same) here is a long day and starts early. We have bread for breakfast as a community around 5am (which means Seth gets up way before that to bake it fresh) and then church begins at 7am (Seth teaches Sunday school class then the main service begins once Sunday school is over.)

We added a time of questions and prizes to make Sunday on Christmas more fun. After church was over, we had a big lunch with the community and once everyone had their fill, then everyone was off to the “mandatory siesta”.

Later that night, we have prayer study (as we usually do on Sunday nights), and then a time of prayer. We added a time of questions and prizes for the kids and youth to get them more excited for the night. This ended around 9pm… needless to say, it was a very different and busy Sunday for us this Christmas.

The following day, Monday, we celebrated our Christmas in a sense, called our family, and tried to reflect on the weekend God blessed us with to be a part of… truly, there is no end to ministering here in the bush. We are so thankful to be here!

Happy New Year to you all! 🎉 May the Lord conform us more into His image this next year and may we learn to be better ambassadors of His name in our daily lives. God bless you!

Seth & Nicole Stokes, your feet to the Tiale people

We wanted to share with you all how our Christmas Eve went…

We are so blessed to be able to do ministry and serve the Tiale people on this day. The day (and the whole weekend) was very special; from prayer with the pastors early in the morning (as we regularly do on Saturday mornings), to then hosting our language helpers and their families for a special end of the year meal (chicken wings, rice, and garden food)… we even brought a surprise! Ice cream! It was definitely a first for them to have ice cream in the village.

After the meal, Seth and the language helpers sat down and started working through 30 key words from the New Testament to find a general consensus on “what word” in Tiale will be best to use for both accuracy and comprehension for the translation.

It was a blessed day to be able to minister to our friends here and to work on the task of getting God’s Word into the Tiale language.

Thank you for your prayers and support!

Your feet to the Tiale people & the country of Vanuatu

~Seth & Nicole

In case any of you aren’t on social media and missed our post… we want to wish you all a very merry Christmas! We love you all and hope you and your family’s were able to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour in a special way.

There is always a bit of wanting to enjoy “traditional” Christmas festivities, but what a better way to celebrate Christmas than serving the Lord in a remote village to a people group who has yet to have the Bible in their language. There is no greater joy than seeing the spiritual fruit that God has produced in them. There is nothing else we would rather be doing, especially on Christmas.

Merry Christmas from our home to yours!

~Seth & Nicole Stokes

We hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving! There are so many things we can all be thankful for. We are so THANKFUL to be BACK here serving the Tiale people. Life here has been a bit of whirlwind, but a good one at that. There has been much fruit from the ministry here. Stay tuned as we will be making several posts soon about just what we mean by “fruit”. Also, we are trying to post more photos on our Instagram account so check it out to see more pics @stokingthefires.

There are many areas in which we still find ourselves adjusting: the language, relationships, house maintenance, property upkeep, the climate, the isolation and the constant work of discipleship… Click on the link below to read our latest newsletter…

We truly appreciate all of you whom we represent, here in the country of Vanuatu,

~Your feet to the Tiale people & the Country of Vanuatu,

-Seth & Nicole Stokes

We spent the day on Monday after the weekend events to specifically engage with our immediate core group of disciples (both the men and their wives). Seth sat down with the men all morning until well past the usual lunch time. Nicole spent the time fellowshipping and catching up with the ladies, singing some Tiale praise songs, and encouraging them to be intentional in the roles they hold as wives and to complement their husband’s ministries, all while they cooked a special lunch.

Seth and the men spent a lot of time catching up, evaluating how their churches are doing, seeing how the men are doing spiritually, asking how to better encourage them, having several times of prayer, along with specific teachings that he wanted to give them in order to challenge their walks with the Lord on a deeper level.

Not every conversation was filled with smiles, some of the men had gone through various trials, but their faith in God was not shaken. One of the men was with us when we had to medically evacuate Nicole, he said this;

“When you left, we didn’t sleep at all that night… we felt sick, and hurt… we look at you guys as part of our family. We are glad you are healthy now, and we know this “Covid-thing” stopped you from coming earlier to us, but we missed you.”

If you remember, when we left, we left not because of Covid, but because Nicole was medically evacuated. 3 men and their wives accompanied us on that trip out of the village, and when we said goodbye to them, they knew we would come back, but they couldn’t sleep that night knowing how they saw Nicole.

Throughout the meeting, we were able to ascertain some very important things. We were able to help give them a fresh perspective and renewed focus, as well as encourage them in many ways. There have been various groups going against them and there are, and were, many wiles of Satan that have been testing them in their faith. We set up a 2-year teaching plan and a discipleship program to hopefully strengthen the local churches that they are shepherding; this much needed direction really encouraged them!

We plan to be more intentional with these 3 men and their wives, as God allows, through living life on life with them, as well as having them in our house, intentionally discipling them. In our absence, God has raised several other men to be more bold in their faith (5 men in particular). We are excited to see God growing His church here among the Tiale people! We are eager to invest in these 5 men as well on a weekly basis, intentionally maturing them as the Lord allows. We continue to see and find many new opportunities to be invested in, between teaching, learning language, and discipling; there is not an end to this work. We are praising God that He allows us to be A PART of the process!

Pleases specifically for pray for these 11+ men that Seth will be engaged with on a regular basis, and the 10+ women Nicole with be discipling. We need lots of prayer for wisdom, discernment, and direction from God in this process! Please pray for the spiritual health of the 4 local churches we are closely connected with, each one being unique in their situations and are very much in need of your/our prayers. Thank you for holding our ropes in prayer! Checkout our Instagram for more pictures and videos: @stokingthefires.

Your feet to the Tiale people and the country of Vanuatu, Seth and Nicole Stokes

We want to share with you about two separate events we recently hosted in our village, one on Saturday and one on Sunday…

There was a lot work that went into getting things setup and prepared for the weekend festivities; going back and forth to the river (40 min. drive roundtrip) to gather firewood (to use for cooking) and to gather stones (used for baking/traditional style cooking), cutting the grass, cleaning up the area, decorating both the community house and the local church, along with preparing lots of garden food, killing two cows, and a pig, along with many bags (40lbs.) of rice. The culture here places eating together and working together as high core values, thus the relationship building, even in the setup process, was encouraging. It was a full weekend starting Friday night with killing of the pig and throwing it in the traditional pit to cook, which really is like an old school ‘crockpot’, and the events continued through until Sunday night.

Saturday’s focus was to encourage the Tiale people as a whole in regards to the Tiale Translation project, to help the locals who did not know its purpose and how it will bless them all (as a language group), as well as to encourage the Tiale people who are aware of its purpose.

Although not as many people came as some projected, we still had over 250 people come, and that represented about 15+ of the 37 (technically 41) Tiale villages. It was a great opportunity to influence and encourage as many of our people as we could. People lingered until late into the evening talking about the topics at hand, feeling both encouraged and motivated, our language helpers were especially impacted. Seth had intentionally prepared the men (those whom he has been discipling for 5+ years) to use this as an opportunity to engage people on a heart level and lead people to the Lord; they really used that opportunity well.

The event consisted of 5 speakers; our local chief, a local language helper (who is viewed as the “head” of our language translation project), a local pastor, a language helper who has assisted in Bible translation for over 25+ years (in a sister language group), and lastly, Seth. Each of the men expressed excitement and gratitude for having a Bible Translator come to their language group.

Some feedback from Saturday…

“I never understood what the importance of translation was, now I see the purpose and it pricked my heart… oh I want to hear God’s Word in my own language.”

– A chief who does not Jesus as his Savior

“I needed to hear this, even though I know Jesus, I don’t know him in my own heart language, I see that once I have God‘s word in my own language my faith in him will grow.”

-A local believer

“Even though I’ve worked in translation, I never really thought about what it will look like in heaven, that I will still be praising God in my heart language.”

-A language helper who has assisted in Bible translation for over 25+ years (in a sister language group)

Sunday’s events were replicated but with more of a focus on encouraging those who are already believers. We had 5 local churches (those within a 3-hour hike) come to our village so that they could be both fed spiritually and physically. When people come for events like this, they usually spend the night, so we took this as an opportunity to teach and train the core group of people within the local churches, while also having one of the local pastors give a Gospel-oriented message to those that lingered around. We wanted to make sure we maximized our reach and scope of our ministry, as God allowed. Some related the events to John 6, having spiritual encouragement and abundant food, while also having leftovers to take home.

The weekend was such huge a blessing! It was wonderful to be able to see so many of our Tiale friends after being away for so long and be able to encourage people inside and outside of our immediate village/language group.

It is an honor to be able to represent so many people and churches back home in the USA and to be able to be used by the Lord in one of the language groups in the world who has YET to hear God’s Word in their heart language. There are over 2,600 languages who have YET to hear God’s Glorious Gospel in their heart language to date, and it is 2022!

Continue to pray for us as we seek discernment with how to disciple the believers and evangelize to the unbelievers. Also, please pray for us as we start back into full-time Tiale learning mode, in order that we can more effectively teach the people and help them to know their Creator God more fully. We so desperately want the people to hear God’s Word in their heart language. Thank you for your partnership in the journey, we could not do this job without YOU!

Check out our Instagram to see more pictures… @stokingthefires

Your feet to the Tiale people and the country of Vanuatu, Seth & Nicole Stokes

We are BACK: FINALLY we made it back to our house in the village! We have been busy getting the house cleaned up and getting it set up once again. We left in a hurry so the house was not packed up the way we would have liked. But we are so THANKFUL that our house is intact and had little damage! Thank you for your prayers for our home! Below is our latest newsletter. Lots of exciting things happening as we kick off life and ministry full-time here. Stay tuned for some exciting news after our weekend celebration…

We are your feet to the Tiale people & the Country of Vanuatu,

~Seth & Nicole Stokes

We have officially arrived on our island, Espíritu Santo!!! What a crazy whirlwind these past few weeks have been! But we have FINALLY gotten here, with our visas in hand (PRAISE the Lord) and have already hit the ground running. Seth is currently up in the village at our house working on the deep cleaning and assessing the damage. Please pray for him as this is a BIG job. Thankfully things seem “mostly” intact. But there is definitely a lot that needs to be done.

Click the link below to read our current update. We love and appreciate you all and covet your prayers.

newsletter-4-august-2022-2.pdf

Thank you for following our journey.

Your feet to the Tiale people & the country of Vanuatu,

-Seth & Nicole Stokes

We have officially arrived on our island, Espíritu Santo!!! What a crazy whirlwind these past few weeks have been! But we have FINALLY gotten here, with our visas in hand (PRAISE the Lord) and have already hit the ground running. Seth is currently up in the village at our house working on the deep cleaning and assessing the damage. Please pray for him as this is a BIG job. Thankfully things seem “mostly” intact. But there is definitely a lot that needs to be done.

Click the link below to read our current update. We love and appreciate you all and covet your prayers.

newsletter-4-august-2022-2.pdf

Thank you for following our journey.

Your feet to the Tiale people & the country of Vanuatu,

-Seth & Nicole Stokes