Dear Prayer Partners,
Jon Reese is a member of Pioneer Bible Translators’ finance department. He and his wife Kathy and their teenage son Ian recently spent several weeks in West Africa while Jon helped work on several financial record keeping procedures for the missionaries there. He also was able to get acquainted with the various missionaries on the field at this time. In the Reese’s January newsletter he wrote some of his observations which we think you will find interesting. |
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Pioneer Bible Translators, like all companies, has an internal vocabulary it uses to talk about its people. Some of the places I’ve worked used terms like hourly v. salary, faculty v. staff, upper management v. middle management, v. employees, etc. – all with the goal of helping our teams to better understand how the organization as a whole fits together. At Pioneer Bible Translators, the vocabulary has to do with missionaries v. support workers v. volunteers.
Clearly, Kathy and I belong to the support workers grouping. We’re not ourselves translators or church planters; our roles are designed to assist those who are translators or church planters, making their work easier, taking burdens from them so the core work can proceed apace. In Africa, we met people who have helped refine my theology about what support or service means.
A Teacher – One of the people we got to know was an Australian woman, in her early 60’s now, who has been on the field for 6 or 8 years. One of the Pioneer Bible Translators’ families had a daughter born with Down’s syndrome. Upon learning of this event, this Australian woman, a teacher by trade, decided she could take part in the work of Bible translation by offering to be the one-on-one teacher for this young child. By doing so, she would free up the mom (a PhD in linguistics) to oversee multiple language projects in West Africa, and free up the dad (a church planter) to spend 4+ hours a day on one particular language project along with church planting in the villages.
So each day, this Australian woman crafts lessons and spearheads the care and educational needs for this little girl. She daily battles vermin, critters, insects, spiders, and occasionally snakes. She hauls her daily water needs by bucket, including the water needed to flush her toilet. She sleeps 365 days per year under a mosquito net and typically reads by candlelight or flashlight. She cooks on a two-burner, propane gas camp stove. And several times a week she goes into the villages to provide medical education and services to the people.
Now, who in the world knows the work she’s doing, day in and day out? Realistically, her audience consists of maybe 6 to 10 people in the whole world. However, it doesn’t change how she works or her dedication to her teaching craft. She’s convinced she’s where God wants her to be, and she’s happy. My goodness, she’s joyful. She happens to be a woman with a remarkable prayer life, constantly willing to share the things God has been doing in her life, pointing out the various and multiple places where God has been orchestrating events to meet her needs. So who knows of her and her work? She’d say God does, and that’s enough for her.
A Mechanic Specializing in Toyota Land Cruisers – Different parts of the globe require different modes of travel for Pioneer Bible Translators’ missionaries. In the South Pacific, boats are needed. In central Africa, the dominant mode of transport is by small airplane. In West Africa, the method of choice is Toyota Land Cruisers, replete with air snorkel for fording water barriers. Two-thirds of our West Africa team travel either 2 or 3 days from the capital (for supplies, meetings, etc.) to their villages for work.
Literally, you couldn’t drive a Honda Civic or an American off-the-lot auto in West Africa. The dirt, the potholes, the water, and the terrain would render non-Land Cruisers incapacitated in a matter of weeks. Yet this reality in itself creates two corollary problems: (a)Pioneer Bible Translators doesn’t train our translators and church planters to do Land Cruiser repair or maintenance, and (b) certified Toyota mechanics don’t (yet) exist in West Africa.
Into this void stepped a Dutch Christian, a survivor of the Sierra Leone civil wars, who’d done his Bible college work in the US, and who speaks four or so languages. For over 25 years, this Dutch man has volunteered to shoulder the load, on behalf of the missionaries, for maintaining the 20+ Land Cruisers in the Pioneer Bible Translators West African fleet.
Over the years he’s developed a network – via Dubai, via Arizona, via the Netherlands, via cargo ship, via plane – to ensure he can stock the parts needed to repair this fleet (with age ranges from 1992 thru 2015). He’s brought in the tools, created a water and power grid at his home, and has painstakingly and lovingly cared for these vehicles so that the probability of our missionaries reaching their destinations is demonstrably higher than it would otherwise be. Throughout his tenure in West Africa, if there were mechanical problems or break-downs enroute, he would drop his life and go to them.
Over Christmas, one of his key supporting churches contacted him to inform him that they would be cancelling his support for 2016. They’d evaluated his work using a new set of metrics and decided they could no longer support him and his family. This church’s support amounted to close to 50% of the family’s overall mission support. How did this man respond? He treated it as one more opportunity to increase his dependence/reliance upon God, as a new circumstance in which to learn and develop faith. So he waits on God to answer and provide.
So what’s the point? That missionary life can be hard? That God is sometimes hardest on those who are His favorites (see Hebrews 11 and 12)? That the battle against Satan never ends (see Ephesians 6:10-18)? Sure. All of these are true.
There’s also a hymn church people used to sing, “So Send I You”. Part of the lyrics read, “So send I you to labor unrewarded, to serve unpaid, unloved, unsought, unknown ….” And I thought of these support workers in Africa. And I also thought of Paul’s words in Colossians 3:23-24, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Hard words. Hard to do. Not easy to let Him be your reward, your portion, your cheerleader. |
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Thank you for your prayers,
Gerald & Ruth Denny
Coordinators of Prayer Ministries
Pioneer Bible Translators |
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