Summer Missionary Ministry in Tlapa - March 2019

From the left, Stu is with Benito (who is a Tlapaneco Bible translator with Wycliffe), Fernando (our director of the Summer Missionary Project) who traveled to see the ministry in March, and Galo (with his son) who is coordinating the Summer Missionary Project in the Tlapaneco mountains.  Galo received our training as a newlywed in 2008, and invited us to start this youth ministry with the 70-plus Tlapaneco churches.

This song, "My God is everywhere," is shown in the MePhaa language.  Please note all of the vowel combinations in this tonal language.

The Tlapaneco leadership team introduced this year some songs and verses in their MePhaa language.  Since they have 7 different languages among their peoples, we needed to form a leadership team to coordinate those decisions.  Benito who is the translator finishing the New Testament is a great asset on this team.  He wants the Summer Missionaries to promote the NT translation available as an app on their cell phones!

This is the Tlapaneco leadership team chosen by Galo to be the new trainers for the training week.  Most of them have participated in all 3 of our training weeks.

The week before Easter we trained these 25 Tlapaneco youth in this very remote church where Galo was the pastor.  Every year we change the hosting church.  This year they sent youth teams to 12 different churches to teach the lessons about Joseph during July.  A total of 870 children in very remote areas were reached in these clubs!

The 3 experienced "city" youth beside us helped during the training week. Though the Tlapanecos did most of the teaching, their presence and suggestions were a great encouragement to these new trainers. 

On Good Friday, we left the training week to help during the annual Tlapaneco church conference of nearly 1000 attendees.  For the first time, the leaders asked the summer missionaries to teach the 200 children present for 5 hours each day.  This gave our ministry a lot of visibility with the churches, and they saw the value of training their own youth to work with children.

The Tlapaneco Summer Missionaries had their hands full with all these 200 children for 3 days, but they realized they were prepared to do something they never imagined doing!

On one day, Cristina helped to teach the group of older kids.

Last year Benjamin trusted in Christ with Galo just before the training camp, and he served last summer as a Summer Missionary.  The training was a real challenge for him, because he barely speaks Spanish (in his village almost everyone speaks only MePhaa).  He is the only Christian in his family, and God is using him!

Nehemiah has served for 3 summers as a Summer Missionary and is on the leadership team now.  He had the opportunity to go to the Amazon jungle in Colombia during June-July with his cousin who studies at Rio Grande Bible College.  Pray for God's leading in life toward missions.