NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

“Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe.”

- 1 Corinthians 1:21

Preaching. The instrument through which God delivers His Gospel. For this reason, it is the tribal missionary, among the people, who is on the front line of expanding the reach of the Gospel. They have the task of building relationships in a completely foreign culture, often in an unknown and unwritten language, and then following the Spirit in effectively preaching the Gospel and discipling believers. They need our prayers, our encouragement, and our support. One avenue through which we support our missionaries is by making technology available to them to make their task more efficient, accurate, and enjoyable.

Technology has, of course, been used against the Kingdom. It can bring the most sordid of human depravity instantly into our living rooms. Its power can be harnessed towards largely material ends, helping us more efficiently meet our personal desires and exploit our neighbor. Or it can “simply” be the means by which vast hours of potentially productive time are wasted.

But it can also be used for His Kingdom. One such Kingdom-advancing use of technology is the CLAware project.

Through the years, New Tribes has learned and refined best-practices for acquiring culture and language. Culture/Language Acquisition (CLA) is carried out in such a way as to build meaningful relationships with the tribal community, develop fluency in the language, and gain deep insight into the culture. Although doing it right takes time, implementing these CLA best practices provides the missionary a solid foundation on which to clearly and effectively proclaim the Gospel.

CLAware (CLA Software) is built specifically to implement New Tribes Mission best practices for CLA. It helps the missionary more efficiently plan, process, and practice the information they gather as they participate in daily life in their community. Missionaries can use CLAware to:

• Efficiently store and edit information
  As missionaries participate in the daily life of the culture, they gather information such as audio files, photos, transcribed conversations, as well as their own notes. CLAware provides a single location to store this information so that it is ready whenever they need it for editing or review.
• Organize information
  All information is assigned its place in a specially designed culture outline. Topics include the everyday concepts such as cooking habits, as well as crucial points relating to the Gospel such as flood legends, moral standards, and beliefs about death. Organizing the information gathered through the CLA process enables the missionary to present the concepts of Scripture in a manner the tribal people will clearly understand.
• Review information
  CLAware can prepare review lessons, such as object-identification using photos, or exporting of audio (to MP3 player, for example) for review while walking to a remote destination. This allows the missionary to maximize his time, hastening the point at which he is ready to preach the Gospel.
• Reuse information
  Information useful in one phase of church planting (for example, while mastering the language) may be useful in later stages (for example, analyzing text for patterns useful for literacy development.)
• And much more!

This is no standard off-the-shelf software package! The list of desired enhancements is growing, and all software requires a certain degree of infrastructure and maintenance to keep it fast, stable, and up-to-date with the latest technology.

Ultimately, CLAware–in the hands of the tribal missionary–hastens the preaching of the Gospel and translation of the Scriptures in the native culture and language of the unreached people group. Praise be to the Lord!