Tony and Tara Sutton Glad to be a part of Church Planting in PNG About
I (Tony) am an MK from Brasil S.A(Stateside I’m from Minnesota). I grew up in Brasil from the time I was 4 until I was 18 and graduated from the mission boarding school. Growing up between boarding school and the tribe where my Dad and Mom worked really gave me the opportunity to see firsthand what is involved in Cross Cultural Church Planting. I believe God used that along with Dad and Moms very Godly influence in my life to challenge me to be involved in Overseas Missions in some way.
Tara is from Kentucky and her parents took her to Bolivia for her last 3 years of High School. She attended a boarding school for those three years which was quite a change for someone in their teen years, but God used some hard experiences and a little child to challenge her to be involved in reaching lost people with the Good News of Jesus Christ. She met me, her husband to be at NTM Bible School in 1995.
Tara and I met at the NTM Bible Institute and we were married in Dec. of 1996. We finished training with NTM in 2000, and after 2 years of Partnership Development we arrived in the Madang Region of Papua New Guinea in January of 2003. After a year of Melanesian Pidgin English, Language and Culture Study, we teamed up with 2 other couples, and moved to work with the Inanbimali People in the Sepik region of PNG, where we began Language and Culture Study all over again:-)
Praise the Lord our other 2 partners were able to learn the Language and on April 21, 2008 we finished teaching from Creation to Christ. There is now a 3 year young Inanbimali church. The believers are being taught in I&II Thessalonians with Revelation to come, Lord willing before the end of 2011.
Neither of us were able to learn the language and we believed the Lord was leading us to be involved in other ways, so we now find ourselves (as of March 2011) at the support base of the Sepik region, where we are involved in supporting the 11 tribal church plants and the 17 families that are currently working in them.
I (Tony), am now involved with what we call PGA (People Group Assessment, formerly known as survey work!) We have approximately 150 different People Groups here in the West and East Sepik Provinces of PNG. My job, along with my coworker Benjamin is to begin to asses the need for NTM to begin a church plant in these tribes. We are excited about this and are looking forward to hopefully seeing enough new folks come to open a couple of new church plants over the next year or two.
Tara, continues to homeschool the kids, take care of the home and has also taken on the job of functioning as the Homeschool representative for the Sepik region of PNG. This means she attends quarterly meetings to discuss how to continue to assist all (17 of them) the homeschooling mothers here in the Sepik region.
We have 3 children Scarlett grade 7, Logan grade 4 and Ava grade 2 toddler!
Pray for all of us as we also hope to build some good relationships with our PNG neighbors.
Thank you for being involved with us in this huge job of Cross Cultural Church Planting in Papua New Guinea!!
Sincerely in Christ,
Tony, Tara, Scarlett, Logan and Ava
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