NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

We are happy to report that Eida’s foot is improving. True to form, she’s been a model patient, assiduously following the doctor’s instructions and doing her therapy. She’s been rewarded by graduating from wearing the heavy “boot” to a lighter brace.

We enjoyed a lovely visit from Steve’s parents who spent a week with us over Easter. They went on to spend a week with each of Steve’s sisters, Victoria and Sandy, and returned home to San Jose safe and sound just a couple of days ago.

Thank you so much for your prayers and financial partnership. May God bless and keep you and supply all your needs abundantly.

Video – Delivered from the Power of Darkness

We’re happy to announce that the Spanish dubbing of this missions video has been completed. Its Spanish title will be “Liberados del Poder de las Tinieblas.” The focus of the story is spiritual warfare in the context of tribal church planting – a timely topic for Latin American churches. It should be ready for distribution in June or July.

Eida’s foot

On March 19th, Eida turned her ankle hard during her workout at the gym. Everyone around heard the pop of the overextended ligament. The X-rays showed a couple of “sprain fractures” or “avulsion fractures” in which a chip is pulled away from the bone at the point where a ligament attaches to it. So the orthopedist put her in a “boot” which is nearly as confining as a cast and ordered physical therapy. They say it will take 6 – 8 weeks for complete healing. It’s painful, but she’s a good patient and is making good progress.

Steve’s parents visit

We were blessed by a visit from my parents, Glenn and Mary Irwin, who came to spend a week with us over Easter. This was the first of a three-week cross-country plane trip, funded by the president’s economic stimulus package (thank you “Dubya”). Due to health issues, they didn’t get out a lot, but they were able to enjoy to the Good Friday choir program at Coronado Baptist Church and witness their son contributing to the bass section. Yesterday morning, they travelled to my sister Victoria Barclay’s place near Waco, Texas, after which they’ll go on to visit my other sister, Sandy Fast, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Our plans

This weekend is Missions Sunday at Coronado Baptist here in El Paso, and we have been asked to share in one of the adult Sunday School classes and set up our display table. We are grateful to God that Coronado has chosen to add us to their list of supported missionaries.

God willing, Steve will be flying on Sunday, April 13th,to Orlando for SLR team meetings at NTM headquarters in Sanford, Florida, returning on the following Saturday. We would appreciate your prayers for us as we review the year’s progress and make plans and set priorites for next year. I won’t bore you with titles, but there are plenty of backlogged projects and a pile of new resource materials which our Latin American partners would love to have in Spanish.

We would ask prayer for God to raise up the funding to cover the future cost of outsourcing the daily translation of the Prayer Bulletin and accompanying news reports. The project page can be seen at this URL: http://www.ntm.org/give/give_project_details.php?project_id=95 .

Thank you so much for being our support team and making it possible for us to equip Latin American missionaries for cross-cultural church planting among tribal people.

Do you remember, back just after New Year’s Day, we told you that our online resource library had crashed? It was a website where we had uploaded all the Spanish resource material for Latin American cross-cultural church planters translated since SLR was started in 1998.

The blessing God had hidden in that shocking turn of events was the fact that it kick-started the process of our NTM Communications Dept taking responsibility for hosting the site. They had a lot of other projects on their plate, so we had to be patient, but today I was introduced by online conferencing (a new experience) to our new Online Resource Library site.

It will take a some time to upload the 500 documents with their descriptions and titles, etc., but it’s exciting to be getting started on that process. Soon these equipping resources will be instantly available to our Latin American missionary partners all over the hemisphere –- just a few clicks away! 

Esther at the NTM Missionary Training Center in Missouri

Many of you already know that Eida flew out to California on July 31st to help Esther with her move to Missouri to finish her NTM missionary training (2 more years).

We could write screenfuls about how God generously provided for our daughter –- starting with giving her a much newer and more comfortable car with more carrying space. She needed every cubic inch – it was packed to the headliner! She and Eida arrived here in El Paso on August 4th, then left for Missouri on the 14th, arriving at the MTC the following evening. Eida helped Esther get moved in and organized, then flew home on the 18th.

It was not easy for Esther to say goodbye to all her central coast friends. We are very grateful for the way the loving people at Atascadero Bible Church took her in to their church family and gave her the opportunity to exercise her gifts and talents. She really put some roots down there.

To see some pictures of her new digs and read her thoughts, click on this link to her blog: http://estheruth.blogspot.com/ She’s already singing on the worship team!

Thank you for your supportive gifts and prayers,

It was a challenging two weeks of Team Translation Workshop, starting with equipment issues (note the double headphones I’m wearing – because the microphone on the first set died early on).

But the greatest challenge was keeping up the pace. We jokingly compared it to being in a footrace with a train. Although we started with a mile of head start, we knew that train was going to catch us soon and run us right over!

It was a two-week workshop, but many of the attendees would only be attending the first week to learn some basic translation principles. The second week was for the teams actually doing a tribal language Bible translation or preparing to do one. 

The majority of the Spanish-speaking participants were still candidates in training, but one Venezuelan missionary (Richard) and two Mexicans hung with us through the entire workshop. Miguel Angel is learning the Trique language (8 tones – extremely difficult) and Ramón (red shirt in the middle of the group picture) is planning to enter a tribal ministry soon.

As you can see by cllicking on this picture, we projected the Spanish powerpoints side-by-side with the English. There were 25 presentations scheduled for the first week. My teammate, Duff Gustafson, and I arrived in Chihuahua with 11 of them translated and worked the whole time (racing the train) trying to stay ahead. We even had Israel Gualtero in Colombia working on them. We came very close to achieving our goal of translating all the powerpoints for the first week. In the very last session of the 6th day, however, Jill Goring (the workshop leader) caught up with us and passed us up.

For the second week, we just translated key slides, but it still kept us working late every evening.

The pace of oral presentation in the sessions was so accelerated that it was a challenge to keep up with the simultaneous verbal interpretation. Duff and I tag-teamed the interpreting, but I’m afraid that some of the content did not come through in Spanish.

We can take a small measure of comfort from the fact that the English speakers reported having trouble absorbing much of it themselves because of the very technical nature of the material and the heavy information load. Our Latin co-workers were very kind, however, and expressed their gratitude for our work on their behalf.

Thank you for upholding us in prayer, we really needed it! Please keep praying that the Bible translations produced by these teams would speak the heart languages of the tribal people they serve in Christ’s name.

Thank God for safe travels

• April trip to Florida for annual team meetings.
• May trip to Paraguay for Team Translation Workshop

Please pray for

• Translation of 12 days of workshop material into Spanish. It’s a LOT of work.
• For financial support for family and ministry expenses.

Update on prior requests:

• We thank God for providing for the repairs on our Explorer.

Steve returned in mid-May from the Team Translation Workshop in Paraguay.

In case your geography is a little rusty, Paraguay is smack in the middle of South America, on the western border of the southern tip of Brazil. It took four flights and about 22 hours of travel to get there. Click here for a map.

The purpose of the workshop was to equip NTM teams which are translating God’s Word into tribal languages by giving them additional training in translation principles and methods.

I was there to learn the material so that we can translate it into Spanish and help present the same workshop in Spanish as well as English in Mexico this July. 

It was great! I learned a LOT about Bible translation. My partner Duff Gustafson has already made good headway translating some of the material. As I work on my part of the “stack of stuff,” I’ll be contributing my perspective to his work, and we’re having it all checked by Israel, our Colombian translator, in order to produce a high quality Spanish version.

Several Brazilian missionaries attended the workshop as well, and they asked that we send them whatever we translate into Spanish, since Spanish it will speed their work in translating it to Portuguese.

To see a few pictures of Steve’s trip, click here. 

Thank you for upholding us in prayer – for health and finances and for efficiency and productivity as we work.

Updates

Praise God for providing for the repairs to our car! We also thank the Lord for the gift of a 95 Taurus which is more fuel efficient.

The Spanish Resources virtual library is not yet back online, but our NTM programmers are working hard on it. Initially, it will be only be member-accessible, but the plan is to create a public access site as well.

Travels

The final days of February found us driving to California for the Missions Festival at San Gabriel Union Church. The following weekend we were invited to take the morning service at Neighborhood Bible Church in San Jose and to attend the evening Missions Banquet at Valley Church of Cupertino. After returning to El Paso, we had the privilege of sharing from the pulpit for missions weekend at Coronado Baptist Church, where we attend.

Last week, Steve was in Florida for our annual SLR team meetings, and next week he’ll be in Paraguay for a two-week Team Translation Workshop with the purpose of translating the materials so that the workshop can be offered bilingually in Mexico in July.

Please pray for safety, for quick recovery from the 19-hour trip, and for God’s provision for the expenses involved.

Thank you for praying for this need.

Enough donations have been received for five more months of compensation for our Colombian translator to translate the Daily Prayer Bulletin and articles into Spanish.

We have heard from missionaries who are working to awaken interest in missions in Mexican evangelical churches that these bulletins and articles have been valuable resources in challenging folks to respond to the Great Commission.

We’re grateful for a safe 3,000 mile trip to California and back in our Explorer. We were even able to tie a very nice mattress (thank you, Coots family) on the rack and bring it from Phoenix, Jed Clampett-style. We’re ALSO thankful that it wasn’t until we had been home for a week that the heater core broke and started leaking antifreeze in our driveway. Between that repair and a major brake job and some servicing that was due, we’re looking to the Lord for $1,700 to cover the shop bill.

Thank you for praying with us. God has always proven himself faithful to meet our needs and we’re learning not to panic, but just to trust Him.

CRASHED WEBSITE UPDATE – GOOD NEWS! 

We are happy to report that our NTM Communications Dept. programing team (which “coincidentally” had already scheduled an international meeting this week) studied our dilemma and they have offered to create a section for our Spanish Resource library on the ntm.org site!

We won’t bore you with the nerdy details, but it’s going to be great! I will still have to upload all the articles, chapters and lessons again, but this time to a much improved site which will be maintained by expert webmasters! And it will be directly linked with the Spanish Prayer Bulletin and current events articles about what God is doing through NTM among tribal groups.

TALIABO VIDEO IN SPANISH

We are happy to report that the Spanish dubbing of the Taliabo missionary video has been completed! The “master” has been “burned,” and as soon as we receive it from Chihuahua, it will be sent to our mission offices in Florida to be reproduced for distribution. Pray that this will be a powerful tool for challenging Spanish-speaking Christians to respond to Christ’s commission to take the Good News to every tribe and tongue.

OUR SENDING CHURCH

The church which originally sent us out from San Jose as missionaries in 1980 closed last summer and was reopened in October as a new church plant by Valley Church of Cupertino. While we were in San Jose for Christmas and New Years, we met with Kurt Jones and Glen Miller regarding the future of the newly christened Neighborhood Bible Church and our relationship with both Valley Church and NBC. Our meetings were very warm, reassuring and encouraging. We’re looking forward to a fruitful partnership with both congregations. They truly have a heart for sharing the blessings of Christ with those who’ve never had the chance to hear.

CAR “ISSUES”

We’re grateful for a safe 3,000 mile trip to California and back in our Explorer. We were even able to tie a very nice mattress (thank you, Coots family) on the rack and bring it from Phoenix, Jed Clampett-style. We’re ALSO thankful that it wasn’t until we had been home for a week that the heater core broke and started leaking antifreeze in our driveway. Between that repair and a major brake job and some servicing that was due, we’re looking to the Lord for $1,700. Thank you for praying with us. God has always proven himself faithful to meet our needs and we’re learning not to panic, but just to trust Him.

May you have a very happy and blessed New Year,

Steve & Eida Irwin
Spanish Language Resources