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“If we are to understand the Word of God, God needs to translate Himself into our own language, so that His Words can speak deeply to each person,”  E. reflects.  “It’s the translation of the Word of God into my language that is at the base of my own faith.”

He is from Bossangoa, the capital of Ouham, one of the 14 prefectures of the Central African Republic. E. was once an atheist, an eager student of humanistic philosophy, and firmly set against Christian faith.

“When my wife would return home from prayer meeting, I would mock her, asking her a series of philosophical questions,” he remembers.  “I aimed to persuade her that God didn’t exist and that her faith was useless.”

His remarks would often make her cry, but she was never dissuaded from praying for him.

After completing his studies and training as a teacher, E.’s further academic plans were blocked by a lack of finances.  In answer to his wife’s prayers, this roadblock became a turning point in his life.  He decided to look for opportunities to use his skills to benefit the local community.  He even approached the pastor of a local church and offered to start literacy classes for church members.
 
The pastor encouraged him to instead enroll in a translation training course being offered to members of the community so they could begin to translate the Bible into Gbeya, E.s’ own mother tongue, which is spoken by more than two hundred thousand people in the Bossangoa region..

“I had no idea at the time this was God’s plan for me,” E. said.  “As I became immersed in the Word of God, I began to understand the incredible love and grace which He freely gives each one of us.  I couldn’t imagine why God would want a relationship with me.  My deep intimacy with God is one of the most amazing things I take from this ministry.”

Soon, E. went from being one of the translators on the Gbeya translation team to being the coordinator for translation and literacy projects in the entire Bossangoa region. “Ever since I accepted Jesus as my Savior,” he said, “my entire life has been such an adventure in faith.”

It has now been over a decade since he first got involved in Bible translation. “God chose E. to work for Him, studying the Bible,” said his older brother.  “My prayer is that his work will be a sweet smelling sacrifice to God.”

When an atheist meets the God of the Bible, anything can happen! Pray for E. and his work in Bossangoa. Pray for the many people around the world who are translating the precious words of Scripture into the native tongues of nations and tribes.

Ernest and Evelyn work in partnership with Oakseed Ministries with the Colaba Slum Project in Mumbai, India. Oakseed assists local ministries that serve abandoned children and the poor who live in the megacities of the Third World by bringing the good news of Jesus in word and deed.

It has been a joy for them to actually see the fruit of evangelism teams that are reaching out daily to both lower middle-class and poor families in that area. These are people who live in the slums, roadside huts, streets and hospitals.  A special team even visits the brothels of Colaba five days a week providing prayer, worship, counseling and guidance.

Recently, this ministry led a couple from death to life. Ernest and Evelyn had developed a close personal friendship with a drug addict and his girlfriend, who was working as a prostitute.  They and their church community reached out to them, befriended them, prayed for them, counseled them and tried to love them like Jesus loves. After much time, the addict and his girlfriend came to faith, were transformed, left their old lives behind and were baptized. In an amazing celebration of new life, they were married before the Lord in December 2012.  In February 2013, Ernest and Evelyn were able to help them move from a garage shelter in the slums to an apartment. Praise God for His transformational love at work in their lives through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Colaba Slum Project is currently planning to begin a preschool in the Balwadi Slum in Colaba.  Pray for God’s provision of a building, teachers and administrative staff. Please pray for Ernest and Evelyn and their teams as they seek to love the poor and forgotten people of these slums.

It was 50 years ago, when Steve Richardson was 7 months old, that his parents Don and Carol Richardson moved deep into the jungles of Papua, Indonesia and made their home among a small tribal group called the Sawi. His dad learned the language and his mom treated the sick, all with the purpose of telling the people about Jesus.

The Sawi were headhunters and cannibals. They lived in a constant state of war and they did not respond to the Gospel as the Richardsons had hoped and prayed. As time passed, his parents began to wonder if the gospel would ever take root. They were faced with the decision to stay or leave. Finally, Don explained to the people that if they kept fighting they could no longer stay. The Sawi were desperate to keep them around, so they finally agreed to make peace with each other. In order for that to happen each Sawi, village gave an infant, a baby boy, to their enemies. This child became known as the “Peace Child.” It was through this unexpected exchange, ingrained very deep in their culture, that his parents were given a unique, perfect opportunity to explain to them that God sent His very own “Peace Child,” Jesus, to make peace with us.

Twenty-five years later, Don and his three sons, Steve, Shannon and Paul, went back to visit the Sawi to see how they were doing. It was an amazing reunion. The people rolled out the red carpet. Hundreds and hundreds of people from five tribes came to welcome them.

Walls have been broken down by virtue of the Gospel’s impact on the Sawi people. They are sharing leadership in the church services, they are intermarrying amongst tribes. Where once they were constantly fighting, they now love each other. It is no longer a place of war but a place of peace. It is a safe place to live now. In an obedient step of faith by Don and Carol Richardson 50 years ago, a legacy of God’s grace is truly visible. People who used to be mortal enemies now see themselves as almost as one. They share a sense of significance.

The villages are committed to staying faithful to the Gospel. The younger generation is really thriving. They have lots of challenges but they are aggressive in progressing and making an impact on others around them. What an incredible privilege it was for the entire Richardson family to join God in His journey to the nations. But they can’t help but wonder how many other people around the world are still waiting to experience what the Sawi’s experienced – hearing the Gospel?

Steve Richardson became president of the Pioneers missions agency in 1999, after serving as a missionary to one of the world’s largest unreached people groups in the world. For more than 35 years, Pioneers’ passion has been to see God glorified among those who are physically and spiritually isolated from the gospel of Jesus Christ—from Bedouins in the deserts of North Africa and animist villagers in the jungles of South America to secular humanists in Eastern Europe and middle-class Buddhist urbanites in the sprawling cities of East Asia.

RBC currently supports 13 missionaries with Pioneers, all with the passion of sharing God’s Word to the lost. Would you take a minute to thank God for the work He has done in the Sawi tribes and in the lives of the Richardson family? Please also pray with us for our Pioneer missionaries across the nations.

Adapted from a letter published to staff of Wycliffe USA from Bob Creson, President and CEO.

Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people?  What clue had He planted to let the Hdi know Who He was and how He wanted to relate to them?

Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for love. Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?”  “Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone. “Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” “Yes,” they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?”  Everyone laughed. “Of course not!  If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”

There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. “Do you know what this would mean?  This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

One simple vowel and the meaning was changed from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you, based on Who I am. I love you because of Me and NOT because of you.”

God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. For centuries, the little word was there—unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.

The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and 29,000 speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25:  “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church…”  I invite you to pray for them as they absorb and seek to model the amazing, unconditional love they have received.

Around the world, community by community, as God’s Word is translated, people are gaining access to this great love story about how God ‘dvu’-d us enough to sacrifice his unique Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be ordered and oriented correctly. The cross changes everything!  Someday, the last word of the last bit of Scripture for the last community will be done, and everyone will be able to understand the story of God’s unconditional love.

This picture was taken in January 2012 – a little over a year ago – when our staff and pastors were blessed to spend some time praying for Marcelo and Holly. We are thankful to God for where he is leading them now.

Marcelo and Holly minister with Open Arms Worldwide in Assis, Brazil. In 2012 they felt the call to change their ministry and move north to Belem, Brazil to work alongside RBC-supported missionaries Lynne McLeavy and Bete Cordosa in the Creative Hands ministry.  This ministry focuses on the men, women and children that live the Flowers Estate, which is actually an area near the dump. In late January, Marcelo and Holly traveled 5 days north with all their belongings and arrived at Bairro dos Flores, or the Flowers Estate  They were able to look at a house to live in the day they arrived and thankfully they were able to purchase the house and move in 2 weeks later.  Owning their own home will communicate to the people that they are there for the long term.  This will be huge in developing relationships with the people of Flower Estates. It will also offer a safe place to store ministry supplies and it is large enough that they will be able to host short-term missions teams that come to help minister throughout the year thus reducing the team cost.

Marcelo will be caring for the church that will officially started the first Sunday of March. This is the first time this area will have a church.  The people from the dump are shunned from other local churches as outcasts. As they prayerfully consider the needs of those who frequent the services, Marcelo and Holly will look to develop additional facets of ministry that will best meet the needs of the church attendees.

Marcelo will also be starting a soccer school which will operate throughout the week for boys, teens, and men. They are prayerful that the school will be a vehicle to specifically minister to the boys and men of the community, sharing the gospel and developing discipling relationships. Marcelo and Holly will assist in the Saturday Bible Clubs, where children and teens gather weekly to participate in group activities and hear from the Word. Holly will be helping in the half day preschool that functions from Tuesday to Friday.

Holly is also excited to be the liaison between their ministry and Word of Life—a local Christian school—where 15 children from Bairro dos Flores are attending, having been sponsored by faithful brothers and sisters from the States. Holly will also be working with a teen servant group called BOPE. Their  prayer is through every activity, they point others to Christ.

The longer they are there and the more they get to know people, the more thrilled they are about the opportunity of being there. They hope and pray that wherever the Lord leads them in life, they never lose the excitement of hopeful anticipation that they have knowing they serve a God who has the power to transform lives.

Though your sacrificial giving to RBC, the Missions Committee was able to significantly help in the moving expenses and with the cost of purchasing their home.  The Missions Committee was also able to increase the monthly support of Marcelo and Holly. We pray that God will greatly bless their vital ministry as the gospel of Jesus is lived out in Bairro dos Flores. Please pray with us for them.

On Saturday, February 16, the sixteen-person RBC Missions Committee met for 10 hours to review the 76 international missionaries that RBC supports.  (The committee will review the 136 national missionaries that RBC supports on March 10.)

Each year, the Missions Committee sends each of our missionaries an update questionnaire so they can report on their finances, their accomplishments for the past year, their goals for the coming year, their prayer concerns and their children’s needs.  Every committee member thoroughly reads through these updates prior to the annual review and comes to the meeting prepared to discuss each one.

The consistent theme of all the updates is that our missionaries need our prayer support more than anything else.  The RBC missionary family is experiencing some painful things, both in ministry and in their personal lives.  Several have grown children with marital problems and looking towards divorce.  Some have children with medical needs. Some have elderly parents with issues and they are far away.  Some of them have some serious health issues themselves.  There are issues in their ministries.  They all need our consistent prayer.

After determining the financial position of the missions budget, the committee looks at each missionary’s support shortage, if they have one.  The committee always considers the needs of those missionaries RBC has sent out first.  Praise God, the missions fund had enough money to give $1750 in increases to 28 of our missionaries.  The committee was encouraged that the average missionary we support receives 89% of their current support need.  This is an increase of one percent over last year.

The committee also looked at other issues facing our missionaries beyond financial needs.  The committee will address these issues and needs over the course of the next few months. As well as thoroughly examining our missionaries, the committee also reviewed the policies that guide the missions program and discussed updates and/or changes to some of those policy guidelines.  Any changes or updates made to the policies will go to the RBC council of elders for their final approval.

The most important thing the committee accomplished at the annual review was the extended time spent in prayer for our missionary family. The committee prayed through 18 pages of prayer requests we received through the update questionnaires.

If you do not yet have one an RBC Missionary Guide, please stop by the Welcome Desk in the lobby and pick one up and begin praying for our missionaries.  They are in some serious spiritual battles, and many serve in some seriously dark areas of the world. Your prayers are essential as they bring forth the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations.

If you have any questions about missions at RBC, please drop us an email at missions@restonbible.org.