Asking Questions...

We wanted to start this week’s post off with a little missionary culture:

You might be a missionary if:

· You have ever had to cancel family movie night due to rain and the movie was to be shown inside the house. (The small speakers on our computer can’t compete with torrential rain on the tin roof…)

· You have used more than two languages in one sentence.

· You have hung a stalk of more than 100 bananas on your porch.

· You have been given more than 2 cubic feet of greens (with names like: aipiga, malumalu, pumkin, and opa) at once

· You tried to eat them all before they went bad

· Despite your best efforts, your kids take their shoes off within five minutes of heading out on a hike.

· A straight ‘A’ student (senior in high school) cannot remember what the name of the 5 cent coin is (America is her home country but she has spent less than ¼ of her life there.)

And now, a little more info about what is going on with the Claasens in PNG. We are almost a week into term number 2 here at Numonohi Christian Academy (also called Lapilo). Things are going well with Nate pretty much adjusted to the workload. Elizabeth and the boys are enjoying a daily routine that involves school and chores and lots of playing in the dirt (and cleaning up afterwards). We are also trying to work ahead a little bit as Nate will be heading out to the Adelbert Mountain Range around the middle of November.

After much talking and meeting with the leadership and seasoned missionaries here, we came to the decision that the current tribal churches need at least two years to mature before they will be ready to partner with us in a new location. This has caused us to spend some time looking into remote areas that have little or no gospel witness – areas that are prime candidates for NTM’s style of church planting effort. At the top of the list is the Adelbert Mountain Range – a 25 by 40 mile range that runs roughly on a north-westerly line between the Ramu River and the Madang Coast.

SIL has an excellent language map of the area that we are hoping to survey. Specifically we are interested in the Pal and Kobol language groups which are about two and a half days of hiking from the nearest road. Our partners have been meeting with one of the big men from that area who happens to have a couple of kids staying in town while they are going to school. Indications are that the Pal people would be happy to have us as well as the Kobol. It remains to be seen what the actual situation on the ground there in Pal is though. It is fairly common in PNG culture for someone to tell you what they think you want to hear. Please be praying with us for wise words as we communicate with the Pal folks who are out in town. Pray too that we act wisely when there – we don’t want to miss the subtle cues that will help us make a decision before the Lord to commit to these people or not.

Tune in next week when we answer the question: Survey? What is that?

Thanks for praying,

Nate for the Fam