Well, to be honest… a lot! Where do we begin? Our first week here we got to experience Vanuatu’s 36 year Independence week. That week was a time of running around getting to know our fellow co-workers, the nationals we partner with, and the church we work alongside and getting settled in our new house. Right away our experience and time in PNG paid off! Bislama (pronounced “bish-lama”) is its own language but we have been able to understand most of what people are saying since day one. During our first week, the church held a pastor’s seminar and this is where we started seeing God move… but first we will share what else has happened. (We apologize for not adding pictures, our internet has been too slow for uploading pictures.)

We moved into a house that needed a good hard cleaning and several repairs. We worked on cleaning, fixing, painting, buying appliances like a stove and a refrigerator (the essentials), and of course beautifying the house to Nicole’s liking. Soon after we started hosting people from the team, which includes both foreigners and nationals (Nevans, “nee-van”, the people of Vanuatu). We are trying to get to know everyone and hopefully encourage them; this past season here in Vanuatu was a really busy and taxing season on many. We are trying to be a blessing and encouragement as the Lord leads us.

Ministry-wise: Seth jumped into a teacher role, teaching and sharing several times a week. He has started to lead a Wednesday night Bible study, help out with teaching and games for a kids club as well as help out with a youth program. Nicole is helping with administration and has helped teach some of the church ladies how to sew. Seth has done several small projects here on the base, as well as done a lot of driving.

Our Life here in Vanuatu Thus far…

We live about 15 minutes outside of town; the church we work alongside is about 10 minutes away. Vanuatu is similar yet so different from PNG; more clean (no betel nut here = no red spit everywhere), more safe , and in some aspects more developed. One missionary looked at us and said “I can tell you did not come straight from America, your expectations are lower, you are not so time-oriented, and you are appreciative of the small things”. It is true, to us PNG trained us to live almost anywhere warm. In Vanuatu, we ride in the back of pick-up trucks a lot, whether rain or sun. Most of our favorite PNG foods and fruit are here! For the first time in a long time Seth does not have to worry about someone breaking into our car or house, the culture here is completely different and way more relaxed. We have not seen a fight yet! While we were in PNG Seth saw a fight almost weekly, most of them resulting with people cutting each other with bush knives.

We are studying Bislama learning to change out certain Tok Pisin words for the Bislama equivalence. With Seth having to speak so many times already, he is feeling more and more confident in his speech. We are starting to investigate culture here, the “Cargo Cult”, along with the “John Frum Cult” are pretty dominate here. Just like PNG and it’s veneer of Christianity, mixed with a catholic heritage, a dash of animism, a pinch of eastern philosophy and shame culture, makes you think a lot when you communicate, especially when trying to communicate the truth of the Gospel.

What is on your agenda this next week or two?

Seth was asked by our team to translate the chronological teaching into Bislama. Seth will be working with the team and several nationals to do this task. Seth is really excited for the opportunity to work with the men, his passion has always been to do lesson development and translate. And now that time has finally come!

God moving…

Well, we told you we would share more about this. In 2 weeks, we will go to the region known as “Big Bay”. Both of us will go up there for a week and get to know the locals, live with them and investigate what are their needs are currently. This trip will have many parts to it:

• Week one: We both go up there and get to know the people, there are some strong nationally run churches that are there.
• Week two: Seth along with some people from the organization, men from the church, and whoever else wants to come will start a week-long plus trek. They will head to many villages some are 2-3 day hike away; they still wear loin cloths! The men will go around encouraging the local pastors, do some teaching, and evaluate how people are doing.
• Week three: Seth will come back to the main village and start a 6 day, 10 lessons per day class and teach through the newly translated materials. The goal will be to go from Creation to Christ, move quickly and touch on some topics of what the church is and its functions, take a sneak peek at Leadership in the church and then finish with the Ages of Ages. It will be a lot of material but it will leave the people with a strong foundation to build upon, and the work of translation is being done ahead of time so that men will have the materials to later teach themselves and their bodies of believers in their villages.

One of the exciting parts to this visit is to see if God is leading us to that location full-time. We are making no commitments but are in desperate need of your prayers! The people still use their heart language, outside of the men and the pastors they still hold to their heart language, there are no Bislama schools near them so they will hold onto their language for several more generations. With all that being said, they want a Bible in their language, they have a small Bible college that they started and they do that all in Bislama so we could help out with that as well. There are truly many aspects to the ministry that sound so exciting! The main landowner in the area is also very strong believer; he is even the Pastor of one of the churches. He has invited us to come and be with him during that time, an open and clear invitation. That is so amazing!

Needless to say that was a lot of information but we want you all to be in on every aspect of our ministry, we want you to know what we have done, what we are doing, and where God may be leading us. We know for many of you who have been praying for us for years to be with working with the people group God has for us, this is all so surreal. This is a very exciting time in our ministry! Thank you for being a part of this journey with us. Keep holding our ropes; we cannot do this without YOU!

PRAY:

• For wisdom and discernment as we look to the Lord for our long-term direction.
• For a local pastor named John and his family; their young son was diagnosed with a deadly illness.
• That we can be a blessing to; the team, our national friends, and the church.

It is our privilege to be your feet to the unreached, Seth & Nicole Stokes

About to board our plane to Vanuatu! Here is our July Newsletter. Click on the link below. Thank you for following our journey… Next post will be from a new country!

Newsletter: July, 2016

We made it! After dodging so many potential issues of; flights, visas, and baggage problems we arrived in Rockie (Rockhampton, Australia). As we were driving to the church from the airport we saw familiar things like McDonald’s, restaurants and malls…. We were not in PNG anymore.

How did the trip go? Well, to be honest we did not know when we would make it to Australia, but we ended up only being 1 day late and 2 bags short, compare that to when we entered into PNG 18 months ago 2 days late and 4 bags short we feel like that was better. Before we left Indonesia we had to straighten out our visas and that was almost impossible; Idul Fitri (the biggest Muslim holiday) was going on so everything was closed for the week prior to us leaving, after 5 trips to the office and 2 days of trying to fix the issue we got our visas this past Tuesday. We said our good-byes to our family (which was really hard) and crossed the border Wednesday. After we crossed the border our driver told us the office had issues on Monday and Tuesday the roads were impassable due to rain, we thought “phew, dodged some more bullets”. We left Vanimo Thursday and headed for Wewak, when we were at the airport the man before us in line fell asleep and someone else took his boarding pass, this made us double-check and make sure we got our tickets (only 28 passengers every other day leave Vanimo)! We arrived in Wewak hearing rumors of strikes by the main airline (which we had to take the next day), they were not flying the day before, that day, nor were they planning to leave the next day… Seth was online and making phone calls all day, we still had to pack up our life from PNG, and say good-byes too! Super busy! Seth went to the airport at 4am (that is when they were suppose to open up) to double-check everything on Friday, expecting not to be able to leave, much to our surprise they opened the doors around 6:45am. Seth was one of the first to be in line (many things happened to get to that point), the plane came 5 and a half hours late, we were almost not allowed to be on because it was a full plane and we had more than one bag each, but at the last-minute we were allowed to get on (and there was 15 available seats on the plane). With the delay we were all but guaranteed to miss our connecting flight… but they held the plane because there was 10 of us connecting. The plane took off over an hour late and now we had to make one more flight!

                In Rockhampton

We landed with less than hour before our connecting flight to Rockhampton from Brisbane. Needless to say that’s when the delays snowballed; we got behind people bringing in bugs and illegal live plants in customs, we took a maxi taxi (which we were told that we had to take), somehow it took 4x’s as long and cost 3x’s more than it should have… of course we are foreign and ignorant so we got taken advantage of, and missed our last connection by less than 5 minutes! But it is okay, the next day we arrived in Rockhampton and 2 of our bags decided to stay in Brisbane, that too was okay because they ended up coming later that night.

We arrived in Rockhampton on Saturday and have been loved on by the Pastor and the Church already, we experienced our first western style church service in 18 months with great worship both in the word, music, and fellowship. We feel like kids again just being in a familiar place getting great food, western conveniences, and being with spiritually minded people.

We are taking this week as sort of “rest week”, we leave in 8 days for Vanuatu, we know that we will have to be ready to serve for 4 months in many capacities before we come back to the states. Pray for our trip and that it is a smooth transition, pray that we can be a blessing and encouragement to the CSL team, pray we can get our minds geared up for CLA again, and pray God gives us wisdom as we will be taking a survey trip in August to see if God would have us serve there full-time.

As always, we are humbled to be your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.

“I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms”. John G. Paton

The above quote is from John G. Paton, famous missionary to Vanuatu, to an elder of his church as he headed out to Vanuatu for the first time, he says it right, “ whether eaten by cannibals or by worms…”. We all must come to that point where we must choose God’s will or the comforts of this world. This past week we got to spend some good quality time with our family, we were able to help out a little bit in the midst of relaxing; helping with food, supplies, packing and logistics, but the hardest part of this whole thing is that it will all come to an end. We will have to say good-bye, and when we will say “hello” again is completely in Gods timing. Like we wrote in an earlier blog, we did not have Christmas together with all of the family (Seth’s) for over 10 years at one point! And that is part of the cost Christ asks of us in order to follow Him.

For the next 3 days; Wednesday through Friday, we transition from Indonesia to PNG, from PNG to Australia, and a week later we head to Vanuatu to see if God is leading us there full-time. Please pray for our transitions, planes, bags, visas and other transportation norms. We spent a day and a half and 5 trips to the Indonesian Consulate office to straighten-out our Indonesia visa, and now we start this trip knowing we received an email that there will be a strike in Port Moresby during the window we travel through… of course there is, such is life.

We covet your prayers as we travel these next 3 days, we leave heavy-hearted knowing we will miss our family but count it as a privilege to serve them as your feet. We are also excited for this opportunity God has given us to serve Him in Vanuatu, it is our privilege and blessing to be your feet for our King. Pray that we get our minds ready and geared up for our time in Vanuatu. We also want to say we are sorry to several people who wrote us, we plan on writing back to you once we are in Australia next week with better internet, thank you for your patience.

We love you all and we will try to keep you apprised of our situation once we get to Australia. Thank you for your prayers and support.

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes

After many attempts to post this newsletter and several days with no internet… here it is… finally. Click on the link below. I am sorry that the picture quality isn’t the best (due to slow internet) but at least you can read what the month of June consisted of. Thank you for following our journey. Please keep us in prayer as we have some big transitions this next month. Pray for safety, health, and smooth flights with no luggage being lost. We appreciate you all!

Newsletter: June, 2016

Your feet to the unreached,

Seth & Nicole Stokes

Abridged Version:

We shared some information that is pretty BIG news for us, and to make sure we shared it clearly we wanted to repost some thoughts and make sure we communicated effectively.

A few short weeks ago, the pastor of our home/sending church; Pastor Kurt Skelly asked us to be open to a new ministry opportunity. Missionary Jeremy Pinero of CSL (Camp Shining Light, we apologize their website is currently under construction) in Vanuatu asked our Pastor if he knew of anyone who could help fill a need in his ministry for a period of time, while explaining to him some opportunities that were opening up to them in Vanuatu. Immediately God put us, Seth and Nicole, on our pastor’s heart and that is where this all started.

We are being asked to help fill the base manager position from the end of July through the end of November. We would be given some freedom during that time to get to know the other missionaries with CSL, learn the make-up of the organization and more importantly, go and be with the nationals learning culture and language. Fortunately, there are many similarities both in language and culture to that of PNG. 🙂

Some time in August we would go to the Island of Tanna with Jeremy Pinero and do a survey trip. Once there we would see the logistics of doing church planting there. We would then finish our commitment in November, come home, reassess what God just did in us and through us.

Once home, we would pray, fast, seek counsel, and connect with you all. We are not wanting to take any decisions lightly, but we also know God is the Author of Peace and He will confirm this or deny this pretty quickly in our hearts once we are there.

If we see this is of God, after connecting with you all (hopefully face to face), we would then resign with NTM, then sign up with CSL and get a multi-year visa and go back to the Island of Tanna and start the process of church planting in 2017!

Other details about this opportunity.

Our intent with this blog is to give some detail to our story and the story being told. This is a lot of information and you probably have many questions. Please write us, we would love to help and answer any questions you might have.

Our history with this missionary and ministry: our home church has supported missionary Jeremy Pinero for several years now, doctrinally he and the organization would match up with the core beliefs that we, our church, and NTM have. The organization CSL was started by Jeremy Pinero’s father, his father was trained by New Tribes. His father felt led to go to Vanuatu and thus started his own ministry, since NTM does not operate in Vanuatu. Jeremy took over the ministry more than 8 years ago, he has grown it to an NGO status and made good relations with the government in Vanuatu. The NGO status enables them to get multi-year (1-5) visas, as well as enables work crews from churches in the USA to come through quite frequently and serve. That process actually helps the NGO status, which in term helps the mission and its missionaries. The freedom of inviting others to come and serve is one of the many things we like about this opportunity!

Vanuatu is not a large country, and for most many are not sure where it is… and rightly so! It’s not that big! It is east of Australia and directly west of Fiji. In the early 1800’s the famous missionary John G. Paton served there and planted many strong churches, sadly he was just one man. And much how like PNG is full of unreached people groups, Vanuatu actually has more UPG per capita than PNG.

When God led us both into missions, our desire was like Paul’s in Romans 15:20, wanting to get to those who have not had any chance yet to hear God’s glorious Gospel. This opportunity is in step with God’s calling on our lives and one of the main reasons we are wanting to visit Vanuatu.

We were told that our time as base manager enables us to have some freedom. Not only do we get to know the mission and other missionaries, but we can get to know the nationals, learning their culture and language.

Bislamah is the trade language for Vanuatu, it is 70-80% similar to that of Tok Pisin, and the culture is very similar to that of PNG. From what we heard and are studyng, the cargo cult has a greater influence there in Vanuatu, making their eastern-shame worldview and their Judeao-Christian-animistic-syncretistic prone belief system get a little bit more messy, google John Frum occult in Vanuatu for a taste, but in the end not much more different from PNG.

When we leave PNG we would make a small detour to Rock Hampton Australia. We will go there to meet the home pastor of Jeremy Pinero and get a better feel of the ministry.

During this whole time we will need you in prayer more than ever, with so many transitions, unknowns and seeking God’s will, we will be fueled only by God’s grace and your prayers.

Once our time is completed, we will come home back to the USA. We figured out that we will have about a month from the end of November through December to visit all of our non-PA supporters, sadly since some are spread out as far west as Kansas, south as Florida, East as New Jersey, and North of New York we will have to make this quick and our time slots might not be the most accommodating… we apologize if we might inconvenience you. We want to get the distance driving done for 2 reasons: 1. It will be close to snow season. 2. If God leads us to go back to Vanuatu, and we would be able to go back quickly, we would have already updated you face to face, our support team. That means for most of our friends in PA we would not be able to see you until after the New Year. Our goal has always been to communicate to you, and to show our appreciation and that is why we want to come to you and see you!

IF God has confirmed this new ministry, we would then go through the due process of resigning from NTM and then signing with CSL, go through the visa process, and then head back to Vanuatu and do church planting on Tanna in 2017! We can see how this transition and time in PNG is of God; our time with NTM here in PNG gave us many invaluable tools and contacts to do the job of cross-cultural church planting. Paul served many years after his conversion in a local church and also served in some short-term trips before God finally made him the missionary as we know him today.

Please pray for us, we need it now more than ever. So many thoughts and so many things to do for each piece to fall into place (Ps. 94:19, 1 Peter 5:7, Matt. 11:28-30).

If you have any questions please fire away! We will get back to you ASAP! We have to pack for Vanuatu (and for coming back to America in November), we will be in Indonesia until July 13th, head to Australia on July 15th, and then head to Vanuatu on July 24th, only to arrive on July 26th… maybe arrive on Spiritu that day or the next, needless to say we have many transitions, logistics, bad internet and other things going on… so please pray for us.

We are thankful God has put you in our life, thank you for praying and supporting us. Thank you for your patience in all of this, we are honored to be called your feet,

Seth’s mom arrived!

Kids being kids

Improvising and putting roofing down

Dem-land

A new Dem baby!

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes

Us

Here is our Youtube video summarizing what we just shared:

Before you read we want to apologize, we have not had internet for almost 2 weeks, the satellite in the bush went down. And when we come out to town we heard the internet went down for the whole Island on the Papua side… a shark bit the power line or something… that has happened before! So we want to apologize in advance if you do not hear from us, we might not have internet capabilities for 2 more weeks and we are not sure if this will even post, we love you all.

Wow, we are not sure how many of you have ever had to make decisions quickly, feeling the weight of the decision before you ever make it, feeling overwhelmed even with the magnitude of what you might be doing… and that is how we feel, today, right now. But God is Sovereign, He is a faithful Creator, and His timing and planning is perfect for His Saints. Why then do we have so many questions, and not simply trust God with a child-like faith? One reason comes to mind, “we want to be like God and know everything before it happens”. But that is not how faith works, He asks us to walk without looking, and pursue Him over all things.

Our desire from day one has been to reach the unreached, and that is what God has pressed on us each day since, for over a decade now. We as feeble humans, with finite perspectives have been trying to figure out Gods “plan” for our lives. Some would say “good luck”, but that is what He asks of us, He gives us paths to follow and then one day like Paul, He will say “don’t go there! Go there!”.

We have served NTM-PNG Wewak for over a year; we have been in the country 3 months longer than that, totaling 16 months. And less than a few weeks ago our Pastor from our Home/Sending church proposed to us this ministry opportunity that sounds “to good to be true”; that is in line with the calling God has put in our lives, cultivated and walked through with hand-in-hand by our Shepherding Home-Pastor Kurt Skelly, while being done in unity and with the blessing of our NTM leadership, as well as confirmed by the peace of God that only HE can give in such a short time.

So what is this ministry? We will give in depth details in the following emails, but for brevity’s sake we will share our opportunity. We are being asked to go to the Island of Vanuatu (made famous by the missionary John G. Paton, he was almost eaten by the indigenous people several times), and serve as a Base Manager for 4 months. The purpose of the title and position is two-folded. 1. It is a vacancy that needs to be filled soon because another missionary is going on furlough. 2. It will allow us to get to know the missionaries on that field, get a feel for the organization, learn the national language, which is 70-80% similar to Tok Pisin, and see if this is OF GOD. We were asked by the director of the mission to come just for 4 months and see if God is confirming this decision IN us. Our Pastor is convinced God will confirm this ministry in our lives, but he too agrees that this is the best route.

What does the timing look like, and what does that mean for our supporters? Well, we have been on the field for over 16 months, so that means we have accrued some break time, and furlough time. You know how some of you have used your vacation/break time for work projects, or some have taken personal time to go do some ministry? This is very similar. We will head to Vanuatu some time in mid-end July and serve for 4 months (we can get a tourist visa pretty easily). By the timing of things it looks like we would come back to America mid-late November. After the four months, we will go home and pray over what God might be calling us to do. From there, if God confirms things through prayer and counsel, we would transfer organizations and do the due process of formalities and paperwork. One of the main reasons we would come home is to see all of YOU (if possible, we know some have moved quite a distance)! We would love to enjoy your fellowship and explain what God is doing face-to-face. We would be able to get a multi-year visa for Vanuatu so that means we might not see you for a good long time, if the Lord wills.

One of the most exciting and attractive things about Vanuatu is that it has OVER 80 unreached people groups (NO Gospel in their heart-language), other major organizations, like NTM, are not there so this has a lot more of a pioneer mission feel to it, which is our heart desire. If the 4 months go well there, and God confirms this ministry in us, we would be asked to possibly go to the island of Tanna and begin, that’s right, begin a Church Plant there. During our 4 months in Vanuatu we are planning to visit the Island of Tanna in August. There are several languages on the island, there is an active volcano, tsunami’s are always a chance, the famous John G. Paton did go and try to witness to them, but most exciting part is: we get to have this possible opportunity to minister and do church planting in 2017.

We know this may be coming as a shock to some of you, imagine how we feel having to make all these decisions in quick succession? We are thankful for our Pastor helping us each step of the way, our supportive family, and our loving friends. We appreciate you all and value any input or questions you may have. Please Pray for us as we have many details we have to think through as well BIG decisions to make.

                  Seth helping unload plane

            Nicole with the Dem

Your feet to the Unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.

We would love to talk with each one of you either through Skype, FaceTime, or a good ole fashion phone call. If emails or messaging is an option, then we can go that route as well. There are some transitions in our life coming up, and as your feet, we want to keep you in the loop every step of the way.

In saying that, we also know between the time difference and your personal busy schedule that connecting directly might not happen for quite some time. With that being said; if we do not hear from you by June 20^th, we will post a series of blogs explaining our new opportunity.

We love each and every one of you, we appreciate your partnership in our ministry. We want to be faithful to our relationship and that is why we sent out this update. Those of you who are a part of our financial support-team should have received an email, and or a letter via snail mail, if you did NOT receive either we apologize! Please contact us so we can rectify that mistake of ours.

Email: stokingthefires@gmail.com

FaceTime/Imessage: nicolestokes22@gmail.com

Skype: soldier4onegod

Facebook & Facebook Messenger: Seth Isaac Stokes or Nicole Stokes

Phone: you would have to message us with your number, and then we would be able to call you.

                         Us heading to Dem

Your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes

Here is a brief video of our time in Dem. We wanted to post a quick video while the internet was good. Just click on the link and it should take you to our you-tube channel. Thank you for following us!

Please pray for the Dem and their missionaries, as we are posting this video we hear the wailing of the tribe, a woman died giving birth. Death is real, and the only Hope we have is in Christ.

YOUR FEET TO THE UNREACHED, SETH AND NICOLE STOKES

This trip has been one of the most memorable trips we have taken thus far, not only do we get to help a missionary and their work, but day in and day out we get to be a blessing to our family. One of the hardest things for missionaries is not being able to see family, we love our parents deeply… but leaving our nieces and nephews was one of the hardest things. Not knowing when we would get to see them next, how much time would pass and how much we would miss in their developmental years. We are thankful for video calls, and we are grateful God allowed us to see them, because after this time we are not sure when the “next time” will be. With our ever-transient lives every moment cannot be taken for granted. In 2013, Seth had Christmas with both siblings for the first time since 2002! That’s right, just 3 kids and because of furloughs and missions it took over 11 years for everyone to be together, who knows when God will allow the next opportunity.

Walking up the Airstrip

Working with our Nephew

We have been able to help out a lot around the house; Nicole has done a lot of cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids… even making special meals like homemade ravioli that take quite some time, which normally would be too long to make with the ever busy schedule in the bush. Seth has continued doing several jobs around the house, painting, sanding, staining, repairing, building, chasing pigs, cutting the airstrip with a hand mower (15% grade incline), teaching Bible and PE class, and much more… even running to the top of the hill to check on the water tanks because something clogged up the water. The houses are fed by fresh springs that fill up tanks, which when full, provide pressurized water. These tanks are several 100’s of meters up hill, pigs, animals and nationals sometimes bump into the hoses or tanks causing malfunctions that need to be fixed from time to time, no matter when that time comes.

Helping with Medical

Waiting for a baby to be born!

The addition to the porch

One of Nicole’s favorite experiences thus far has been hiking to a couple different ladies huts at night with the other missionary ladies. Many ladies are currently pregnant and Nicole got to be with several of the ladies right before and right after their pregnancy. This time was also very sobering as she got to see some animism first hand, one lady was having complications and so they literally laid a baby pig over her, said an incantation, and then they sacrificed the baby pig… this reminds us that though they smile and are friendly, they are still lost and need a Risen Savior. Please pray for the DEM team as they are learning language and culture so that one-day they can speak to the people and give them the Word of Life and Truth.

Thank you for your faithfulness to our ministry, your feet to the unreached,

Seth and Nicole Stokes