NTM - New Tribes Mission | Planting Tribal Churches

Our online library has gone down.

Dec 29, 2006 – We just learned yesterday that our website (www.ntm-materiales.org) of over 500 Spanish entries (articles, book chapters, etc.) has crashed. We were alerted to the fact by a couple of users who wrote to ask us why the site wasn’t working.

The support people from the hosting service advised us that the server (hard drive) on which our site was hosted died and they were unable to restore the contents.
Of course, we do have copies of all this material, but it will take some time to re-upload all of it and reconstitute the descriptions (not backed up) and enter them in the index. Now we know what we’ll be doing in the month of January!

There is a silver lining to the dark cloud above – it has presented us with an opportunity to reevaluate and determine if we want to make any changes.
We are very grateful to God for our time with our kids and the rest of the family here in San Jose. Only a few days are left before we begin making our way back to the Mexican border.

Spanish Prayer Bulletin

A very encouraging report has just reached us from Oscar and Sharon Ospina. This NTM couple moved last summer to Mexico City to raise awareness in national churches about tribal missions. They are also working to establish a new campus of the Instituto Misionero Transcultural (Cross-cultural Missions Institute) in Mexico City, beginning from an already-established church Bible School.

They report that the bulletin of prayer requests and news items which we send out in Spanish are proving to be a tremendous resource which they use daily as they educate and motivate Mexican Christians to get involved with taking the gospel to unreached people throughout the world. We hope you are excited to know that your support for this ministry is challenging more workers to respond to God’s call to send workers into His harvest fields.

Prayer Bulletin Update

We’re grateful and happy to report that 5 months of support have come in to extend the time that we can compensate Israel for his translation of the daily bulletin and articles. Please pray for more long term funding.

God bless you all in 2007!

Steve & Eida Irwin
Spanish Language Resources

December will be the last month we can pay our Colombian translator for putting out the NTM Daily Prayer Bulletin in Spanish. The grant for designated for this purpose has been used up. Please join us in asking God to lead us to a solution. Humanly speaking, it seems that our three alternatives are either  1) to take it on ourselves, 2) or to find another volunteer, or 3) for God to supply the funds to continue paying a translator. But the Lord may have another plan.

One of the important services provided by our Spanish Language Resources team is the daily translation of the NTM Daily Prayer Bulletin into Spanish.

This is a ministry that we started back a few years ago when New Tribes Mission first began sending out a “Daily Bulletin” of prayer requests. At that time, there were a few brief requests each day, and I thought: We could translate these and send them to our Spanish-speaking missionaries. Then they could participate more as a part of our mission team, joining in prayer for crucial needs, like the first presentation of the gospel in a tribal tongue.

So, we put together a mailing list and began translating the prayer requests every weekday. The response was very enthusiastic!

After a few months, one of our Venezuelan missionaries (married to an English girl) volunteered to do it for us as “English practice” during his furlough in the United Kingdom. After his furlough ended, we asked Israel, one of our Colombian missionaries who was on administrative leave, if he would take it. By then, there was usually one online article linked to each day’s prayer requests, so it had become more of a chore, but Israel took it on gladly!

Nearly a year later, Israel left the mission, but he continued translating the bulletin for us on a volunteer basis (while job-hunting). We discussed this situation as a team and decided to seek funding to pay him $300/month for his work, based on the going rate in Colombia (a fraction of what translators charge in the States).

We were thrilled to be given a $5,000 grant to cover this cost. It was a real answer to prayer!

By this time, the distribution of the “Boletín de Oración” had been turned over to the mission’s Communication Department, using e-mail “blaster” software, with the purpose of enlisting Latin American Christians as prayer supporters and keeping them informed with fresh daily news items.

When NTM sets up a Spanish section of the www.ntm.org website, the articles that accompany the daily prayer bulletins will provide fresh daily site content.

Unfortunately, our grant money is running out at the end of this year. December will be the last month we can pay Israel.

We are now considering different solutions to this problem:

1. We could take over the translation again. BUT the bulletin has expanded and often includes three linked articles a day in addition to the prayer requests. This would take several hours a day of work, cutting deeply into work time for other projects.

2. We can look for another missionary to volunteer. BUT the missionaries with the fluency required in written Spanish are very unlikely to have several hours a day to dedicate to this. 

3. Or we can seek more funding to keep paying Israel. We have increased his monthly compensation to $350 because of the greater number of daily articles he is translating. This is close to a living wage for his family.

We’re asking you to pray for the Lord to lead us to a solution. My preference would be for God to supply the funds for 2007 so we can continue to compensate Israel, but we are open to whatever God wants. 

Please join us in placing this need at his feet. 

Steve & Eida Irwin
Spanish Language Resources
New Tribes Mission

Thank you for praying! You’ll be encouraged to learn how  God answered.

• Our daughter Esther had a great trip with her church team to the Czech Republic. God supplied the financial support she needed, which was great. But we were even more touched to hear how attached she became to the Czech kids in her class. It’s been hard for her to adjust to being back in the States. Her heart is over there. 
• We asked prayer for housing for our partners, the Gustafsons, who live in Atlanta. God provided them with a lovely home which they were able to buy with the help of a charitable organization! It’s an amazing story. If you want to hear more, drop us a note.
• If you have followed our news items, you’ll know that today, August 25th, we finished the Literacy Manual project and sent it to our mission offices for printing and distribution. Yes! What a blessing!
• We are clear to proceed with the Spanish dubbing of the Taliabo video, an inspiring story of God’s work in an Indonesian tribe. Pray for good progress. We’d like to finish it by the end of the year.

Mission accomplished! This morning, we sent the Spanish version of the NTM Literacy Manual to our mission’s U.S. headquarters to be printed and distributed.

This 217-page instruction book will be a tremendous resource for Latin American missionaries who have taken on the challenge of teaching tribal people to read and write their own language, making it possible for them to read the Scriptures translated to their language and build a strong Bible-based church.

We hope this manual will be in print in time for our supervisor to take a supply with him to Colombia next month for a literacy training module.

Thank God for all the hard work done on this project by our partner Duff Gustafson, Latin America Literacy Consultant Wendy Rees, and our hired translation checkers Claudia Gutiérrez, Salvador Tarín and Israel Gualtero. We thank the Lord also for providing valuable software through the Clark family.

And thank YOU for praying for us, and giving faithfully to make this possible! As our support team, you have a vital share in this accomplishment.

My dad called the other day, as he often does, and asked what I was doing. “Just sitting here working,” I told him. He laughed because that’s where he always finds me. What in the world would a missionary being doing all day on the internet? Well, here’s just one example:

Monday – Just a week ago today, I got an e-mail from Alberto in Colombia. Alberto is a former student of ours who has blossomed into a tremendous cross-cultural church planter. He and his wife have learned the Guahibo tribal language fluently and are working day and night teaching and discipling Guahibo Bible teachers. Because of his successful experience, he naturally was called on to help other church planters and was also given the hat of consultant (the reward for achievement is more responsibility)

So, Alberto writes me because he is looking for the list of the Old Testament passages that need to be translated in order to teach the Bible.

In the old days of missions, Bible translation was generally limited to the New Testament. If the O.T. was translated in to the tribal tongues, it usually was done in the form of Bible stories. But since we have adopted the stategy of teaching the Bible chronologically from the beginning, we have found it very important to translate Genesis and many portions from the rest of the Old Testament.

Alberto needed the O.T. passage list. He had asked around the field and nobody seemed to have it. He couldn’t write to the Field Ministries Office (FMO) at our mission offices in Florida because he doesn’t write English, so he wrote to us. I told him I would get right on it.

Tuesday – By the next day, I had an answer from the FMO. They sent me a PDF copy of an in-house publication that included the chart (in English).

Wednesday – I worked for about an hour making a copy of the chart in MS Word, then discovered I could edit the PDF file with my Acrobat program, which saved me a bunch of time. Then I sent both the partial Word version and the complete PDF version to Alberto, asking that if he got inspired to complete the chart in Word, would he send us a copy?

Thursday – Alberto thanked us for the chart and sent us the completed Word version. Then we proceeded to forward his chart to the other Spanish-speaking NTM fields (Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay) and training centers.

By posting the list to our online library at www.ntm-materiales.org, this resource is now also available to any missionary with internet access, whether they are with NTM or with another mission or working independently.

Although this is something of a “SLR nerd story”, I wanted to share it with you to show how our “resource hub” is benefitting the Spanish-speaking cross-cultural missionaries in this hemisphere. By investing in our ministry, you make that service possible!

Steve & Eida Irwin
Spanish Language Resources (SLR)

Chava’s health

We earlier reported the good news that cancer had been ruled out as the cause of his chronic illness and weight loss. However, we have just learned that he has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. It is treatable, from what we understand, but I’m sure he and Andrea and their baby would appreciate your prayers for his full recovery.

Tim Harness visit – Tim first came to El Paso with Perry Knorr from Atascadero Bible Church to remodel our bathrooms in March. He then signed up for a July 6-22 NTM Assist summer missions project in Chihuahua (see http://www.ntm.org/missiontrips/assist_mexico.php). He flew here a day early, on July 5th, in order to spend a day with us and bless us with his skills.

With Steve as his plumber’s helper, Tim installed a utility tub in our garage and did several other needed fix-up jobs. Tim did in one day what I couldn’t do on my own in several weekends, and taught me a few things in the process. Praise God for the variety of members in Christ’s body and how each one contributes to accomplishing his work. (Click on the Photos menu above to see pix.)

As part of our daughter Esther’s preparation for a missionary career with NTM, she is spending a year with Atascadero Bible Church, which is her home church. She is working in their office and is involved in their prospective missionary discipleship program. One of her tasks is to help coordinate a team going to the Czech Republic in August to run an evangelistic English-learning camp. Pray that God will raise up the financial support she needs for that trip and that she would be a blessing to the team and to the Czech people.

In the light of the amount of material that our Latin American partners need in Spanish, our two-family team is quite shorthanded. We often think of what a blessing it would be to have administrative help that would free us up to focus on the tasks we are particularly equipped to do. Our ministry and work situation are unique so God would need to supply a very flexible and creative bilingual person who would be willing to adapt. Thank you for praying.

Please pray for our SLR partners, Duff and Sharon Gustafson, who in July will need to find new housing in Atlanta. They need to stay in that area for a variety of reasons, a key one being Sharon’s health. They are looking to the Lord to buy, if possible. Considering their situation, it will take a special provision by God to make that happen.