First Lord's Supper

Dear friends and family,

We’d like to take a minute to update you on what’s going on in the Tobo church. These are exciting days for us, not only to be moving into Tobo in two weeks, but also to be able to witness some exciting things going on with the believers there.

Over the last 2 years our partners have been working on translating some of the scriptures into the Tobo language. The book of Mark has been completed along with portions of Acts, Genesis and Exodus. They are being printed and bound right now! When we move in we will be there to hand out the very first scripture portions to the Tobo church!

Our partners have also recently taught on Baptism after many believers were asking questions because of some other religious groups in the area baptizing infants so their sins can be forgiven. We will be moving in just in time to witness more teaching on this and probably some of the first baptisms in the Tobo church!

The first Lord’s Supper was taken last week and we copied and pasted part of our partner’s update below:

There was no grape juice or crackers, and definitely no suit and ties being worn yesterday. The babies continued to cry, the little kids played soccer on the grass, and the dogs kept on barking. There was a small fire in the middle of the adults and one lady slowly turned the sweet potatoes over the open fire during the sermon on baptism. When the sweet potatoes were done, Jason and Alex took their knives and peeled them. Then Jason (knapp) led us in prayer, and the sweet potatoes and water were passed around for everyone to share. And that is how we remembered our Lord’s sacrifice and death for us.

This was the first time we have done the Lord ’s Supper as a complete group with the believers. But there was that one time on the trail that Chad ate beef crackers with one of the guys, and a couple other times when the ladies were together drinking tea and eating sweet potatoes. We have been teaching them that we can eat and remember what Jesus did for us on the cross at any time. I love the simplicity of scripture and how Jesus took the staple of the Jews and used an everyday occurrence (eating and drinking) as a way of reminding us of what he did for us. The Tobo people have no way of getting wine or bread. But God provided them with their staple: sweet potatoes and water, for them to be able to break and eat and remember His son Jesus, and the sacrifice he made of himself for them.

We are so excited to be part of this infant church and all that the Lord is doing to teach and grow the believers there. Please keep the Tobo church in your prayers as they are hearing and understanding what God’s Word has to say about these things for the first time. You can pray specifically for the church on Wednesday nights, (our Thursday mornings) as the believers meet to fellowship, sing and hear God’s Word.

Through your prayers and giving we can all be a part of what the Lord is doing in Tobo to build His church. Thank you for your role on our team!

extreme makeover "tribal home edition" #1

Dear co-laborers,

It’s hard to believe that in just a few weeks we will be moving into Tobo. Our days right now are very busy with house building preparations, but we want to keep you involved in the details and organization of house building in Toboland.

So… what does it take to organize house building in Papua New Guinea? Well frankly- a lot! And since it’s a bit more complicated than back home I thought you might like to hear about what building in the bush is like here in PNG. Well, at least our experience so far!

Unlike Home Depot; the famous one stop home improvement store, in PNG you have to go to three or four stores to try to get all of your supplies. Even then you can bet that they won’t have what you need. And when you DO find what you need, you can count on it being at least twice as expensive as in the States. So last month I had to spend a week in Lae, one of the bigger cities in PNG, to buy all our house building supplies. Another big reason I bought our supplies from there is that it is only about a 20 minute flight into Tobo as opposed to an hour flight from where we are living in Madang (The shorter the flight, the less expensive it is) So we have been able to save some money having our wood and house building supplies flown in from Lae. But what do you do with all your supplies once they’re bought? Since we are flying our supplies out of Lae I had to rent a 20 foot shipping container to store all of our supplies in. This is necessary because in PNG things have a tendency to walk away if they’re not locked up!

Since it is very expensive to fly supplies into the bush we want to take advantage of all bush materials that we can. So we talked with some of the Tobo people and they agreed to cut quite a bit of wood for us from the bush. Of course they’ll be compensated for all their work, but this still saves us a lot of money. So, our partners divided out our materials list as evenly as possible to the different families in Tobo. They will be cutting our rafters, our floor bearers, 2x3’s, bamboo for the inside walls, and more.

Flying our supplies into Tobo is another job in and of itself. This is where things get costly. One 20 minute flight costs $800 while others are around $1000 each. Last Tuesday we had our first flight carrying our supplies into Lengbati. For this I had to fly from Madang to Lae and help load the MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship, which New Tribes Missionaries often use because they have a bigger plane) Twin Otter. For the first flight I flew in with our supplies to Tobo and helped to unload it. The weather allowed for two flights on Tuesday and we’ll have one more next Tuesday (one was just cancelled today) to get more supplies in… if the weather’s good, and one more the following Tuesday…if the weather’s good! Because of the weather and an assured flight cancellation or two, we were sure to plan on a month to get all of our supplies in- good thing!

Thanks to the help of our coworkers and a ton of Tobos we were able to unload the flights very quickly. We threw together a temporary shelter for the wood to keep it dry until we begin house building on October 2nd. I stayed in Tobo for 4 more days and during that time we marked out where the house will be, cut down trees, and double checked our supplies.

I had a great time reconnecting with the people there. They were excited to see me & I was able to be there for the Thursday morning believer’s meeting and it was a huge encouragement. As I sat and watched one of the believers, Nikkos read translated scripture portions in his own language I was reminded of the importance of the work here in Tobo. House building here in PNG is not the easiest and cheapest thing to do in the world but being able to remain here in Tobo to be a light in the darkness and see God’s church brought to maturity in Christ is absolutely priceless and well worth all the headaches of house building in a bush location.

We thank the Lord daily for each prayer and dollar given for our house building efforts. We could not do any of this without you! We’ll continue to keep you updated on the process… here are some dates for you to remember and be in prayer about:
~ September 4th… early morning supply flight into Tobo
~ September 11th…hopefully the last supply flight into Tobo.
~ October 2nd…we’re loading up our family and moving into Tobo to start house-building!!
~ Please also pray that the Lord would provide for some unexpected additional expenses. Thank you for all you’ve given to help & we know the Lord will continue to provide.

Your Hands and Feet to the Tobo people,
Jason, Nisae, Kadynn, Judah and Eden