David and Kristia Abbott your connection to tribal missions
Savannah displaying one of our catch.
It’s not Father’s Day yet, but we did several things this last weekend that would have been good ways to celebrate.
Nearly every good weekend starts out with fishing. OK I’m biased, but Caleb and I caught a decent fish dinner Saturday morning once we discovered that bream were biting and not bass.
Two days at Daytona Beach hardly seemed long enough to celebrate 20 years of marriage.
It was a wonderful time getting to talk without interruptions, take walks on the beach and eat breakfast together.
We had so much fun that we decided we would keep celebrating our marriage even though our anniversary is over.
David talking with two home group participants
In our post titled “Our teaching strategy and progress,” Kristia and I mentioned something that has become important to us in our discipleship strategy — repeatability.
Kristia and I have mentioned from time to time that we are involved in teaching, but we’d like to share with you a little more about our strategy and how it is going.
We understand the Great Commission as recorded in Matthew 28:18-20 to be more than sharing the Gospel. Jesus’ instructions are to “make disciples of all nations.” Sharing the Gospel is part of discipleship, but is only the beginning.
We’re getting the privilege of having two special little girls stay with us for the next 10 days. If you have followed our family updates for a few years, you may remember Trinity.
Trinity and her younger sister Hannah came on Sunday afternoon. David started them right out with a 3 hour hike in the woods. It actually wasn’t as much “hike” as it was “play.”
.jpg)
In June Kristia took our foster daughter and went to North Carolina. David left a couple days later with Katrina and Caleb and headed for Missouri.
We’ve dreamed about providing personal websites for all NTM missionaries for a long time. As David discovered after managing sites for up to 17 missionaries in just one country, updating websites manually would not be a feasible solution for an entire organization.
With programmers like our coworkers, Andy Corley and Gabor Leidenfrost, we’ve been able to produce database driven web sites for all NTM missionaries. Web pages that can be updated online or by email by the missionaries themselves.
In order to fix function and content issues in a semi-manageable fashion, we’ve been releasing the sites to our missionaries in phases. Our most recent release was to our missionaries on home assignment.
Since New Tribes offers an annual “Refresher Course” for furloughing missionaries in Missouri, Andy, David and our department director, Macon Hare, went to the seminar to introduce the sites and be on hand to provide support.
I say releasing the sites in stages is a “semi-manageable” way because our web development team has been working very long hours the whole month of June to keep up with our other responsibilities in addition to making these personal sites work the way we have envisioned.
Please pray for us as we seek to make these sites a valuable tool for believers around the world to participate in planting tribal churches. And where I come in, restricting the value of these sites to those who would like to keep tribal people in spiritual darkness.
During the Refresher Course, Katrina and Caleb were able to participate in activities with other missionary kids. Kristia was able to help pack up her parent’s house for an upcoming move. This weekend we were finally able all be together again.
