Editor's Letter

Dear Friend,

I listened intently as the old Wana chief told me his story.

“When our babies died we burned our houses. We destroyed our gardens. We wailed through the night. We were helpless. We had no hope,” he told me. Softly, sadly, he added, “So many of our babies died.”

The Wana people of the Asia-Pacific region were trapped in a worldview that brought death and destruction. Over and over this cycle of life repeated: death, destruction, hopelessness. 

He told me that missionaries moved into his village when he was a young man and learned their language. But his people were not interested in what the missionaries had to say. The people needed to focus on keeping the ancestors happy by not breaking taboos.

But babies continued to die. Houses were burned. Gardens destroyed. Wailing dragged on through hopeless nights. The Wana people could not escape this cycle. They did not realize that the message the missionaries brought could give them eternal life and hope. They did not realize that God’s message of salvation would deliver them from their world of destruction. 

Then one day the missionaries’ baby got sick. The people watched as the mission airplane flew the baby and parents to the city hospital. When they  heard the baby had died, they thought, “The missionaries will never return. Someone will come to burn the missionaries’ house, and we will never see them again.”

But the missionaries returned. They continued to translate God’s message into the Wana language. They taught God’s message again. “And this time we listened,” the  old chief told me as he leaned toward me with a smile. “This time we believed.”

The old chief gestured around his village. “Today we worship God and His Son, Jesus. We left our destructive ways and now we live with hope. Our church is strong. But when we look beyond we see other unreached people in our country. We know we need to go and reach those people, just like the missionaries did for us, no matter the cost.”

In this issue of NTM@work you’ll read about a people group that is no longer unreached, and the amazing team God brought together to reach them. You’ll be encouraged to see that God is multiplying all that you and I do in His name and for His glory.

Macon Hare

Executive Editor