Field fair

New Tribes sends missionaries to tons of countries. We just had a 'field fair' week with a few representatives from those countries, to tell us the needs and help us decide where we want to serve in New Tribes. We got a little glimpse at how much need there is for the gospel in this world!

 The Mexico presentation was sobering - among the 30 million people in Mexico city, there are indigenous groups of people that have moved out of their native lands for work. They still speak their native language and separate themselves in their own ghettos of hundreds of thousands of people. They must be reached in their own language because they don't know Spanish well enough to understand the gospel in that second language.

This is Denny, one of our small group leaders. She and her husband are so encouraging!

It's so warm and pretty outside!

Our newsletter

For one of our classes we had to design a newsletter that we might send to supporters. I guess we were going to have to start one eventually :) Check it out and let us know what you think!

Classroom life

Here are a few snapshots of what our classroom is like. We've made some great friends so far and are really happy to be part of such an awesome group. Some incredible things have happened to us in just the last couple of days:

An anonymous donor paid for this semester's books for us. We were shocked as this is close to $100 worth of materials. One day in class I opened my laptop to find $20 laying on the keyboard. Total amazement at peoples' generosity is pretty much our only response. Also Gina's parents made and paid for an eye doctor appointment for Gina so that she could get new contacts (her old ones were a huge cause of frustration). Thank you so much for that guys, she feels so much better now. Thank you for your incredible generosity. My (Ben's) parents have also begun giving monthly to help support our financial needs. I hope you guys know how encouraging that is to us to keep going. Okay, on to the pictures!!

In case you're trying to read the notes on my laptop (you stalker), FBT stands for Foundational Bible Teaching 

Where have we been, and what are we doing now?

This can inspire a lot of jabbering, we have plenty of stories to tell! There's nothing worse than wanting to do some casual reading and finding a wall of text, though, so here is where I'm going to put the short version:

August-December: We lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin at New Tribes Bible Institute and graduated. It was a great time of learning and we're glad we did it, but hoo boy was it exhausting!

December-January: We moved from Waukesha back down to Nixa, Missouri where we spent Christmas and New Years' with Gina's parents. We were able to spend some time moving our stuff into our new apartment in Roach, Missouri, where New Tribes has its Missionary Training Center. Also in January we took a quick jaunt down to Sanford, FL, where Ben's family lives. It was an awesome visit and really sweet to see everyone. We definitely miss them tons. Okay there's a necessary rabbit trail here - We have decided to pursue missionary training mainly for a couple of reasons:

  -We learned things about the gospel and about our relationship with Christ that we cannot ignore, or live without sharing.
  -We feel that God has led us here partly by excluding the availability of other options.
  -We are willing to, where others might not be.
We realize that these don't sound like super "missionary-like" motivations, and it makes us a little self-conscious to be training with so many others who seem to have a laser-focus toward one field of service or another, but we know that we will certainly learn much here.

So tomorrow, we start official 'missionary training.' We'll be learning how to teach the Bible in a cross-cultural setting, how to learn, write, and teach in languages that don't yet have an alphabet, and all sorts of other great stuff.

More to come later, I have promised myself to get better at blogging.