Teaching Faithful Men to Teach Others
Teaching Faithful Men...
Since the inception of New Tribes Mission, teaching “faithful men who shall be able to teach others” has not been viewed simply as a lofty goal, but a necessity. Just two years after NTM was founded in 1942, the October 1944 edition of NTM’s magazine read: “If the world is ever to be evangelized, it will be done by these native churches who are self-governing. … Therefore, if the world is to be evangelized, we must go to the various tribes and present the gospel, [and] establish New Testament churches so that members of these churches ... can pass the message on to those who have never heard — those of their own people and to unevangelized tribes.”
...To Teach Others
This “passing on of the message” continues to today. Case in point: The Inapang people group of Papua New Guinea whose lives are intertwined in marriage with the Tangguat people.
“When the first church was born among the Inapangs, some of the strongest believers were bilinguals who had families in the neighboring Tangguat village,” wrote missionary Bill Housley. “They were anxious for their families back in Tangguat to hear it too.”
For the missionaries, it seemed an impossible task to find a way to reach another people group in yet another language while their time and efforts were absorbed with nurturing and caring for the infant Inapang church. But the need was evident, so they wrote a proposal for the work among the Tangguats to be opened with minimal assistance from foreign missionaries.
And it happened!
Missionaries Tim and Tiffany Lanier partnered with the Inapang church in the outreach. They shared that “a really neat aspect of this church plant … is seeing the Inapang church grow and thrive as they step across linguistic and cultural barriers to take God’s Word to their neighbors.” Greater yet was hearing the Inapang believers exclaim, “Now the Inapang and Tangguat believers are one family!”
One Family in Christ
Methodology may change over the years, but some things never change. Please pray for NTM missionaries as they continue to not simply plant churches, but to nurture and equip these churches to become church planters themselves.