NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

Dear Friends,

Have you ever felt like you were in a TV show? We had that experience
recently in the Philippines. The TV show was "Amazing Race". We were on
our way to visit the village Toni used to work in and where she left her
heart 4 and a half years ago. Since our mission doesn’t have an airplane
stationed in the area anymore, we were going to fly on another mission’s
airplane into the village. We were supposed to be at the airport at 6:45 in
the morning. Being us, we started out on the 90 minute drive at 5:45 in the
morning:-) Toni was driving because I left my driver’s license in Papua New
Guinea. A few minutes into the drive we came to a police roadblock. No
problem! The car’s paperwork was in order, but Toni was driving with her
Australian driver’s license and they wanted proof that we were tourists and
didn’t actually live in the Philippines. Of course, we had none. They were
going to take away her license and return it to her after she had taken a
class for bad drivers! Toni chattered away in beautiful Tagalog and after
awhile got off with a warning, but now we were very late. Toni is usually
timid behind a steering wheel, but you would have all been proud of how she
wove the car in and out of bicycles, motorbikes, cars, buses, and water
buffalo all along the way. As we neared the airport, we realized we didn’t
know which road to onto to get there. We asked directions, which was
useless, since we were unfamiliar with the area. Finally, Toni pulled and
asked a guy beside the road, "Can you get in and take us to the airport?"
He was happy enough to do that and we soon were there. Unfortunately, he
took us to the wrong side of the airport, where commercial airplanes land.
There was only a lone security guard there at that time of morning and we
asked him how to get to the other side of the runway, where the mission
plane is. He said we could drive across the runway and go thru the gate on
the other side to the mission compound. So, we drove out onto the runway
and began searching for the elusive gate. We drove up and down the
airport’s paved runway and couldn’t find it. We were just waiting for
lights and sirens and arrests but finally found our way into the right area.
It was an adventure, but we made it in time for our flight.

All in all our trip was very good, but also very tiring. I spent two weeks
in Florida at a training seminar for translation consultants. Toni and the
kids spent those two weeks in the Philippines where Toni reconnected with
many Filipino friends while handling both kids on her own, which generally
meant travelling with them a couple hours a day in taxis:-( We were also
able to spend time with fellow missionaries with whom Toni was in training
in Australia. After I returned from the States, we spent one more week
traveling in the Philippines before returning to Papua New Guinea. We are
home in Inaru now and feeling like things have somewhat returned to normal.
Thanks for praying for us while we were travelling.

Normal life in Inaru for the next month will consist of finishing the
translation of II Corinthians, checking translation for another missionary,
meeting weekly with the church leaders, and also starting a post-literacy
reading group. We have felt the need (especially with the recent changes in
our alphabet here) to help those who are already literate to improve their
reading skills. So, one night a week they will come to our house to
practice reading–the ladies with Toni and the men with myself. We
appreciate your prayers for all the activities we have going on with the
Inaru believers. Especially pray that they will continue to place God first
and accept His Word as ultimate authority. A wonderful Christian woman
named Priscilla (Nabuwa) died while we were gone and it made it all the more
clear how many of the believers here are still fearing witchcraft and not
believing what the Bible says on the subject.

Thank you all for your prayers and support and encouragement while we are
over here. We are grateful for all of it.

In Christ,

Jason and Toni Stuart and Jedidiah and Ella Jo

Dear Friends,

Many of you have written and asked about the last couple weeks. When we arrived back in Inaru after conference, the Inarus were all eager to get
started with the Bible school, but we had no other attendees from any other village. For various reasons none of them showed up. We started with
nearly the entire village of Inaru attending. We were teaching foundationalchronological Bible lessons, which most of the village had heard already, so
the focus of the teaching was on the younger people who had not heard and believed before. Attendance stayed good for most of the teaching, in spite
of the sensational death that occurred at the beginning of the teaching.

On the first day a teaching, a village man named Francis (Bli), who had been disfellowshipped from the church for his constant disputes with his wife and others, took a young widow as a second wife. The next morning during the teaching, Francis went hunting with some dogs. The dogs came back in the afternoon and everyone called out and waited for Francis as day turned to night. In the morning we cancelled teaching so that everyone could go search for him. The search party found him dead in the jungle, with no marks on his body to give any clues as to why he died. This is a classic witchcraft killing to the Inaru mind. Why else would a perfectly healthy
man in his 40′s walk off and die for no reason? And the fact that he had taken a controversial widow (who had already lost two husbands) as a second wife the day before clinched it. He must have been killed by supernatural means. The flurry of speculation, tall tales, and out and out lies occupied everyone’s minds for a few days. I often wonder why the Lord allows events
that tend to reinforce the Inarus’ traditional mindset, but it seems he wants us to use them as teaching opportunities. Many people came to us with
questions and I believe that after the dust settled, more people had more of an understanding of what the Bible says about death.

After the funeral we started the teaching again and went straight thru for 9 more days until it was complete. It was a very tiring and intense time for me to have to teach so many lessons a day and then study for the next day
and practice acting out skits with the Inaru believers and also try to squeeze in some time on translating II Corinthians. On the last day we acted out the crucifixtion of Christ and told those listening that if anyone had learned anything new or believed for the first time to please come and let us or one of the church leaders know. Then we as a family flew to Wewak to begin our travels. So, please pray for the Inaru church leaders as they follow up on the teaching and try to determine if we have any new believers as a result. I know that immediately after the last day of teaching our church elder Raymond (Keiko) sat down with his teenage son and another teenage relative and re-explained the Gospel to them and challenged them to believe. A few others gave a challenge to the crowd as soon as the
re-enactment of the crucifixtion was over. Probably the biggest immediate result we could see was that the church in Inaru seemed to be re-energized
by the teaching and many men seem keen to want to take a more active role in the church. Please pray for men like Solomon (Biga), Job (Wosu), Theo
(Wobuwa), Paul (Waiya), and Felix (Mabiyota), that they will continue to have a strong desire to want to serve the Lord and increase in their devotion to Him.

We are now in Wewak and on April 8 we will fly to the Philippines. I will drop Toni and kids off there so that she can see many of the friends she had when she worked in the Philippines and after a couple days, I will fly to
the States to attend a translation consultant workshop. I will be in Florida from April 12-26, so if any of you are in central Florida at that time I would love to see you. After the workshop I will fly back to the Philippines (sorry, won’t be visiting any of you in America) and we will go
visit the tribe Toni worked in when she was single. We will arrive back in Papua New Guinea on May 8 and will fly back into Inaru on May 12. We would appreciate your prayers on our travels, just that it would be a profitable
time and that we would be able to return safely to Inaru.

Thanks to all of you for your prayers and support and encouragement. Though we did have a death during the Bible school, our two terminally ill people
are still with us in Inaru and many other distractions that could have disrupted our teaching never happened. We greatly appreciate your prayers.

In Christ,

Jason, Toni, Jedidiah and Ella Jo Stuart

Dear Friends,

We are out in town right now for a translation check, and then will be here
another week for our annual conference when all the missionaries with New
Tribes Mission in this area get together. We are enjoying our time in town
(even though I am working all day), and Jedidiah especially is loving
watching the cars drive past (and even getting a ride every once and awhile
himself).

A few of you have written to ask about the status of our upcoming Bible
school. We are planning on doing it once we get back to the village on
March 20. Right now, our elder Raymond is travelling around the other villages of
our language group to promote the Bible school and he should be getting back to
Inaru this week. Please pray that we will get a good response from these
villages. Supposedly the pastors fromone village are out in town right now, so
if I happen to see them I will also talk with them about the Bible school.
I can think of a few roadblocks that could cause poor attendance at the
Bible school. Please pray for the following issues:

-We currently have two terminally ill people in Inaru and one young man in
another village was recently diagnosed with liver cancer. If any of these people die
before the Bible school, it would be unlikely that anyone would want to
attend.

-One man in our village wants to force the local widow to marry him and is also
accusing her family of killing his brother and nephew by sorcery. He is
threatening police action, and big court proceedings during the Bible school
would be very disruptive.

-Their is also a court case coming up regarding an unwed mother. Her family
want to put pressure on the father of the baby to marry her. He doesn’t
want to marry her because she is his cousin:-(

-The Inarus have recently started collecting a type of tree bark that Asians
buy and use as a seasoning. Everyone is collecting the bark and stockpiling
it and that has become their focus. We only had 12 people in church this
last Sunday because the rest were gone to find tree bark.

All of these could be problems that Satan could use against us, so please be
praying for God’s Word to go forward and for people to understand Him and
commit themselves to Him.

We do appreciate all your prayers for us and your
help and encouragement in many ways. Please keep praying.

In Christ,

Jason, Toni, Jedidiah and Ella Jo Stuart

Dear Friends,

Just a quick note to let you know what is happening with our Bible school
here. Some ladies from our village went to one of our other villages in the language group this week
and came back yesterday and said that no one is planning on coming this next
week for the Bible school because they have all gone to their gold camps
(panning for gold is one of the sources of income for the villages we have
invited). Anyway, I met with our Inaru guys last night and they decided
that what would be best would be to postpone the Bible school for a month
and then when our family gets back from our annual conference on March 20,
then we would do the Bible school whether anyone from other villages shows
up or not. This would be for the benefit of a whole new generation of
people (pretty much everyone under the age of 20) in our village who haven’t
heard the chronological Bible teaching straight thru since it was first
taught in 1994, as well for the people from other villages. Postponing for
another month will give the Inarus time to go around to the other villages
and promote the Bible school some more.

Thank you for your prayers for the Bible school. We have everything here
ready to go. Our mission personnel in town did a mammoth job of printing
up a couple hundred Scripture booklets and Bible lessons books for us.
Please pray that next month we will have a good crowd here for the Bible
school.

In Christ,

Jason and Toni Stuart

Dear Friends,

Greetings from muddy Inaru, where our airstrip has flooded twice in the last
week! We had a nice long dry spell, but that has ended. We are all healthy
here with nothing worth complaining about. I know that is an answer to many
of your prayers and we thank you for praying. Actually, it is not just
because of your prayers. Almost every time our more faithful Inaru
believers pray publicly, they pray that we as a family will stay healthy and
will be able to live with them until we have finished our job here.

We are in the midst of preparing for our two week "Bible school" that is
coming up in the last two weeks of February. At times, I feel a bit
overwhelmed by the thought of it and wonder if we have bitten off more than
we can chew, so we really need your prayers to see this come off well. Some
items to pray specifically for would be:

-Pray that the Inarus would gather enough food to feed all the extra people
who will show up in our village. The Inarus are not generally well-known
for their hospitality and I am praying that the Bible school doesn’t close
down halfway thru because everyone is hungry.

-Pray that I would be organized and have all the preparations done in time.
Right now we have a bunch of girls coming each morning to string traditional
beads to make a rope of over 6000 beads, one bead for every year since
Creation. We will use this on the first day of teaching to show how long
this world has been around and then show when God did key things like the
Flood, the Ten Commandments, the Birth of Christ, and some significant
events in Papua New Guinea history. Also, I will be doing some skits along
with some of the Inaru believers, including a dramatization of the arrest
and crucifixtion of Christ. The Inarus have not done drama before as such
(though they are great storytellers), so this could end up to be a big flop
or a big success.

-Pray that the Holy Spirit would be convicting and preparing the hearts of
those who attend, so that they would be open to learn new things from God’s
Word. Pray also that I would be sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit
as I teach to have wisdom to answer questions that arise and the right
illustrations at the right time, etc.

-Pray also for the Inaru church, which seems to be in a spiritual slump right
now. Maybe the Bible school will be the shot in the arm they need, but
right now most of them are focussed on interpersonal conflicts in the
village. Church services have been poory attended lately, though when we
meet there are always encouraging little things. Today, for example, a
widow named Duwei gave a testimony. Awhile back she was involved in
immorality and our elder, Raymond, asked that she not come to church until
she was willing to change her behavior. Earlier this week she came to us
and said she was very concerned that she felt she was "outside the flock"
and wanted to make a change and be involved with the church again. She gave
a very nice testimony this morning of how she wanted to do what was right
and didn’t want her children to grow up ignorant of the Lord. So, even
though many people are in a slump, the Holy Spirit is continuing His work.

Thanks again to all of you who pray for us and are involved in the work here
in many ways. Please at this time also remember to pray for the missionaries in the
nearby villages of the Inanbimali people and the Blackwater people, who are teaching God’s Word for
the first time to these people.

In Christ,

Jason, Toni, Jedidiah and Ella Jo Stuart

Dear Friends,

We hope you are all enjoying your activities leading up to the Christmas holidays.  We are in the town of Goroka now, but will soon be returning to the village and we will be spending Christmas there.  A couple other missionaries who work in other locations have accepted our invitation to spend the holidays with us, and a few others will be arriving by boat from a neighboring village just to spend New Year’s with us, so we certainly won’t be getting lonely.

I was recently reading a publication that gave some prayer requests for the church in general in Papua New Guinea and I was thinking how the Inaru church measured up in the areas that they mentioned.  I thought that I would share a "report card" of the Inaru church with you so that you could know some more specific areas in which to strengthen the Inaru believers with your prayers.

BIBLE TEACHING-  The Inaru church is being taught successively thru different books of the New Testament. In this area, I would give them a high grade.  It is our conviction that expository Bible teaching is what makes for a mature church, and from my point of view the Inaru Bible teachers are doing a good job of presenting the truths of the Scripture to the rest of the believers.

CHURCH LEADERSHIP-  We have one ordained elder in Inaru and one other Bible teacher as well as several guys who help with leading songs in the church
services.  Though the church is not awash in mature leadership, the current leaders do seek to encourage the other men who are faithful and to include them in serving in the church when possible.  In this area, maybe the Inarus would only get an average grade, but we are certainly not discouraged with the current church leadership.

TRANSLATION AND LITERACY-  Although the Bible translation is progressing well, I would have to say that the Inarus must get a very low score in the area of literacy.  We have a couple dozen literate men and less than a handful of literate women and no progress being made to help the rest of the church become literate. There are literacy materials available and different men have taught the literacy program in the past, but the church as a whole doesn’t seem to have the heart to do what is necessary to get an active literacy program going.  Of course, we can’t fault them too highly in this, as reading and writing has not been part of their culture in the past and they will not place the emphasis on it that we do.  However, we do ask your prayers that they will see the importance of it and that they will hunger to read God’s Word for themselves and desire that everyone else be able to read it too.

FELLOWSHIP WITH OTHER CHURCHES-  Most of the Inarus’ contact outside of their village is with villages that do not have a clear Gospel witness.  There are some tribes in the area with strong churches that could experience mutual strengthening with the Inarus, but the contact with them is only sporadic.  The Inaru church would only get an average grade in this area as
well.  Pray that we can strengthen the ties between the Inaru believers and other believers in the area.

REACHING THE NEXT GENERATION-  I am afraid that in this area, as well, the Inarus don’t get a high score. The last complete chronological Bible course to lay foundations for salvation was taught 12 years ago, and a whole generation of children has grown up without that teaching.  They know some of the truths of Scripture, but there are gaps in their knowledge.  Please pray that the Inarus will make a commitment to see God’s Word taught to their young people.

OUTREACH-  This is another poor grade for the Inaru church.  Our language group has 3 other villages.  One village is nominally Catholic with no real knowledge of God’s Word.  Two other villages have an evangelical
denomination and some believers, but also much confusion and much mixing of  the old beliefs about sorcery with the parts of the Bible they have heard.  In two of these three villages, women have been executed in recent years on suspicion of being witches.  In all three villages, the main topic of conversation on any given night is witchcraft and sorcery.  The Inarus have
the potential to bring light to these villages.  Please pray that they get a vision for that and see that God can use them to do a miraculous work in these other villages.

In looking this over it strikes me that the Inaru church is very similar to our Western churches– very good at maintaining the status quo, but short in the areas that require personal sacrifice.  When you pray for your own
church, will you please remember to pray for the Inaru church as well.  They  are fellow believers in Christ, struggling with the same things you do, and you can do a tremendous service to them by praying.

We do appreciate all of you who pray and help us in so many ways.  We certainly can’t thank you sufficiently for what you do for us.

In Christ,

Jason and Toni and Jedidiah Stuart

Please pray for the Inaru church, as we are out of the village for a month. Pray that they will be growing in the truth of God’s Word as they are taught from Revelation.

Dear Friends,
We have been back in the village for 2 weeks and have another two weeks  before we leave again to involved in some more  linguistic/translation workshops. Its hard to feel settled when we are in and out so much, but hopefully that will slow up soon. While we were gone last time, there were some interesting developments in the Inaru church.

NEW BIBLE TEACHER- While we were gone, Raymond decided that one of the other men named Matthew (Weba) should be involved in the Bible teaching.
Matthew was the first believer in our village and has always been faithful to attend the Bible teaching. I personally have had some reservations about him being in church leadership because of some moral lapses and troubles in the past (not too distant past, in my mind). However, Raymond feels that it is all right for Matthew to start and I will trust Raymond’s judgment on the issue, as he is the elder/pastor of the Inaru church. The truth is that Raymond is feeling a bit "burnt out" from being the only teacher for so long and is just glad to have someone to help him. Anyway, please pray for Matthew, that we will see integrity of character and faithfulness in his new ministry.

TEACHING ON REVELATION GOING AHEAD- In general, the believers are very interested in the teaching from the book of Revelation (where else can you hear about 7-headed beasts and dragons and stuff?). When Raymond does the review, he gets lots of good answers, especially from our usually silent women. Toni ordered a picture scroll from a missionary in the Philippines that goes thru the events depicted in Revelation and having colorful pictures is a real asset to keeping people interested. Our booklets of
Revelation are some of the most in-demand Scripture portions that we have had printed for a long time. We are thankful for the interest and do pray that the teaching will bring conviction to some people and encouragement to
many.

Otherwise, we are keeping busy with the usual. I am translating Acts and also spending time nursing along our sick, elderly, pretty much senile tractor. We are thankful to all of you who pray for us and help us in so
many ways.

One more prayer request of an urgent nature: In our last letter, I mentioned a neighboring tribe where missionaries were starting to translate Scripture portions in preparation to present the Gospel. Last week, one of the missionary wives was taken ill with an undiagnosed illness and was medivaced to Australia. The doctors still are not sure as to the problem.
We know that our adversary the Devil doesn’t want God’s truth to spread and I think that this is one example of how he tries to thwart God’s work.
Please pray for recovery for Andrea Holmquist and their family’s quick return to the tribe and that the darkness of the tribal people will soon be lifted (the missionary team is hoping to start teaching in April).

In Christ,

Jason, Toni and Jedidiah Stuart