Category: Christian Missions

We have the exciting opportunity to participate in VBS at Grace Church Frisco this summer. How? Well, they are doing VBS completely virtually, online. They are using the curriculum Incredible Race by Answers in Genesis. The main theme throughout is the story of the tower of Babel, which works pretty well with our jobs as Bible translators. So we recorded five short videos talking about ministry here and relating it to the Babel story. I was thinking, if Grace Church Frisco is doing VBS this year, maybe other churches are too. And maybe even if churches are not able to…

Stacey and I are reading a new parenting book called Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family, by Paul David Tripp. This particular parenting book is not super practical. Tripp does not lay down step-by-step instructions for how to deal with each and every situation. Instead, he guides Christian parents with Gospel principles, and shows how those principles should affect the way that we parent. The second chapter in the book is entitled ‘Grace’ and hits at the heart of a major problem with my Christianity. Here is a specific quote that I think explains the point…

Here is a quick, informal video that we put together on why we do what we do. It is designed for churches or individuals who are just learning about Bible translation among the Kwakum.

“Understanding Scripture in a language other than the heart language in which we think and experience emotion is like trying to eat soup with a fork. You can get a little taste, but you cannot get nourished.” – Cameron Townsend These past couple months, we have been training a group 8 Kwakum people in principles of translation and we have seen them go from getting a ‘taste of a Word of God’ into being nourished by it. Let me give you an example. I (Stacey) was teaching on how we can translate concepts that are unknown to the Kwakum people…

My job since 2012 has consisted mainly of language learning. First, I spent 6 months studying at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (now Dallas International University). A big part of our coursework involved language and culture acquisition and analysis. We then spent 16 months in France participating in an immersive program in the Alps. After France we moved to Cameroon. We moved into a village with the Kwakum people in January 2015 and spent nearly three years pretty much exclusively studying the Kwakum language and culture. We spent a year and a half completing a Master of Arts in…

We have experienced a lot of joy in discipling a couple who recently became Christians. They have been together for a few years now and have a son who will be 1 year old in May. When they were baptized they decided that they should not live together until they could be married. We have spent the last few months watching them prepare for the wedding, and they have been giddy! Throughout the whole process it was acknowledged that before they could be officially married the man would have to pay a bride price. A bride price is when the…

One of the very few Christian Kwakum died tonight. He was in a terrible accident which involved at least two children, one of whom died. I played a very small part in helping with the situation as some of our World Team colleagues took the survivors to a hospital in a city about 40 mins from where we live. But as I went to help, I was stopped by some police officers. In spite of my pleas of emergency, they demanded a bribe. They kept me at the police stop for 20 precious minutes. And now that it is over,…

Hurdles When we first moved to Cameroon, I was introduced to the machete which is all so common in daily life here. It is used to kill snakes, cut fingernails, slice vegetables, clear a field in the bush, plant seeds; it is used for absolutely everything. And yet, I had never known life with a machete, so I frankly didn’t see the immediate value of it (that has since changed). If “my people” have survived for generations without a machete, is it really that important? This is exactly the same question that is often asked among illiterate people when being…

Yesterday, we, along with about 50 people, sang praise songs to Jesus and danced in the streets for hours. Why? Like my son Kaden said, it was because we were joining in with the angels in Heaven who were rejoicing over sinners who had repented of their sins. We walked through villages as people came out of their homes to see what all the singing was about until we reached the river where three Kwakum people were baptized (two out of the three are our close friends). Let me tell you how the Lord has dramatically changed the lives of…

The last few weeks have been hard. It has not been one hard thing, or even something major, just a steady beating of difficulty. In this short period of time our washing machine broke, our remaining solar batteries (the others were stolen) quit charging, I messed up our generator, and our water pump mysteriously stopped pumping altogether (meaning no hot water). We have made a lot of good progress in Bible storying and literacy, but the success has also been marred by critique. It seems there is always someone ready to let me know what they don’t like. We have…