From Our New CEO

Dear Friends,

The focus of this quarter’s Ethnos360 magazine is near and dear to my heart. Offgrid Tech was very young when my wife and I took our missionary training. The book Tech Tips for Living in Remote Locations, written by Tim See, one of smartest men I have ever met, had just been completed. Our class was one of the first classes (1991) to take the tech course that Tim pioneered and taught. I LOVED it! I knew we would one day be living in a remote location, “off the grid,” as they say, and the idea of knowing how to design, assemble and maintain our own solar electric system way out in the jungle was exciting. We learned how to calculate how many solar panels we would need for the appliances we planned to take with us, how to connect them properly and safely and how to monitor the load so that our batteries would not be ruined through over-discharge. I also recall learning how to solder electrical components using nothing but a 6-volt battery as our power source. I felt like MacGyver, if you are old enough to recall who that is.

Not too long after that, our family did find ourselves deep in the jungle, more than an hour by airplane from any possible connection to the electrical grid. The training we received made a significant difference in the quality of our lives out there and in our ability to carry out the work. The task of church planting in an unreached people group takes a long time even if everything goes well. How much harder those years would have been without reliable electricity!

The team at Offgrid Tech have continued to learn and improve the quality of what they can offer to missionaries going out. We have a son now living on the other side of the world in a remote location, and we were blessed to see his electrical set-up recently. Comparing his system to ours would be like comparing a Ferrari with a VW bug. And what’s more, back at the beginning, the Offgrid Tech team taught us how to design our own system. Today, they do that for the missionary. They then ship the entire system, everything needed to supply a house with electricity, to the remote location. With the training the team provides, the missionary knows how to uncrate, install and maintain the system when it arrives.

I cannot overstate the value of the service this team provides for the cause of the gospel reaching into unreached people groups (UPGs).

I trust you will enjoy learning about this part of our team as you read the following pages.

Yours in Christ,
Steve Sanford, Ethnos360 CEO