Sunday, September 19, 2021 PM

Johnson's and listen to them as they update us on their ministry, that we have partnered together with them over the years, what a blessing they've been to us, and hopefully we've been to them, and so then we will have, you know, a time of fellowship after they finish, and we can catch up with all the latest details.

Okay, Vern?

Get this mic on me, and I'm a little bit nervous, because usually I get to turn it on and off, but I heard about the one missionary not used to technology, and he's in the bathroom not realizing it's still going.

Anyway, Denny's concerned about the pole. I'm a little bit sorry about that, because this light, trying to get the light off and still leave lights on, it's on this side of the pole, so if you want to shift, I understand.

Just turn them all off? Now I'm going to wish I had it right in the middle. Okay, just real quick, I know there's some of you that aren't really familiar with us, so some of these slides may be kind of repeats for those of you that know us.

Our first interaction, this is interesting, I just found out two days ago, our first interaction was with Jenny, Jenny Brown at the time, and she came out and actually helped us build our house when we moved into the village where we're at in Africa.

I didn't realize that when she came back, she didn't come back to Sunnyside. They were still, the Browns were still living in Washington at the time. So then, they moved down here, and by the time they get down here, we came home on furl, and that was 91.

So that was our first interaction with Sunnyside, and we've tried to come back every time we're back from Africa since. We were trying to get back here last year, but because of COVID, Brother Michael said not to.

One of the, I'm going to have to speak a little bit for myself, and I'm going to try to hurry through these slides so Jenny can have some time to talk. I'm just going to try to introduce you to what's going on.

If you think of a question as you're going through, there will be time afterwards to probably raise those questions. One of the things for me was I liked John 316, but when it said, go ye into all the world, I kind of wanted to pick and choose what that looked like.

It was like, God, I don't want to get to the end of my life and think that I picked how I was going to work for you. It's not like it was my gifting or anything, and I was really hesitant to give him a blank check because really, he might send me to Africa.

In so doing, and I was about 20 at the time, I given him a blank check. I said, let's go for broke. At the time, it was going beyond the Iron Curtain. Russia, not fun. Thank you, God, there's God smuggler.

It seems like if there's somebody that's interested, maybe there's Bibles available. Option two, Muslim countries, same thing. I didn't realize at the time that Russia has a lot of languages, but at that time, I thought Russian was it.

Muslim countries, Arabic, and then I knew about option three. There are people in the world that have never heard, if you don't go, because we were raised in what was then New Tribes Mission. It's now called Ethnos 360.

Honestly, I had seen the pros and cons of the mission itself, and I think you'd say this about any church, any organization. I'm not trying to point fingers, but God, really? They're the ones that are doing the work probably better than anybody else.

Anyway, God doesn't steer a parked car. Put in your application, please, God, close the door here. Nonetheless, knowing that you're giving God full sway. Going into the mission, I was single. Denny and I met in the training.

I'm just trying to catch up on my story, how much Denny wants to give of her own. I think maybe she already shared some things with the ladies this morning. You probably know her already better by what she has shared.

This is going to be fun.

I can see it now.

Right now, there are 7 ,360 languages in the world. 704 have the Bible. 1 ,551 have the complete New Testament. 1 ,160 have portions. That leaves 3 ,945 languages without anything. These are SIL, Wycliffe Bible Translators, stats on the website.

You go to Wikipedia, English has 450 translations. Again, if you're asking God, where's the biggest need? Here in the U .S., I know that it's becoming a very sin-sick world. There's a lot of people that really probably haven't heard it as well.

For me, it's like these people have never heard it. In saying that, we ended up over an ivory coast. That's where Ivory Coast is. We usually have to fly through Europe. There's no direct flights to Ivory Coast.

I'm not sure why Americans aren't flocking there. We have to go through France because Ivory Coast was a French colony until 1960. This is where we're at. I put a picture of Josh and Chris in here because Chris is our daughter.

She's also one of your missionaries. I'm just showing you real quickly. This here is Molly. They're in red because the U .S. State Department considers them no entry zones because of terrorism. I call them insurgents because we don't know really who they are at this point.

I've heard that there are as many as three different Muslim groups that are behind a lot of this. There's actually a certain amount of infighting or competition about trying to make a lot of these countries up here in West Africa a Muslim state.

Because there are now actual incidents in Ivory Coast just about 60 miles from where we're working, this circle is kind of the Palika area. The red zone for the U .S. Embassy has now dropped down below into Ivory Coast.

Josh and Chris are only 30 minutes from where we live. It's nice to be able to see them, but that's where they're at right now. You guys were having to ask for me to live as Christ to die as Cain. It's a whole lot closer.

So I'm just letting you know these things and where we're at. For you that haven't actually seen what we actually do, one of the biggest things that constantly goes through my mind when I think about the grace of God is I didn't choose my place of birth.

I could be sitting in some African village, have no concept there might be a missionary coming. If you're a Palika person, you're probably like a lot of Africans. Especially in the villages, you get up as just little.

As girls, you're learning to put little cans of water on your head and go to the well with mom. You're washing the dishes with sand that you can find around and maybe a few leaves. You're helping with the cooking and you're helping with the pounding of the corn.

For the women, it's really all day work just to live. When they get done in the morning with their getting food halfway ready at night, off the fields they go, come back in time to cook the meal for the family.

They eat around 8 .30 and it's up the next day doing the same thing. If you're a boy, Laurie, for you that were there at TAG, pardon me, you're going to see some of the same slides. I quickly grabbed them out of the presentation.

If you're a boy, more often than not, you're going to help dad. If dad can scrape together $50, he'll be able to put first son in school and second son will be condemned to no education just for $50 for the year.

Take care of the cows. That's what you'll be doing. Right now, we had some gifts given and we were able to give scholarships to, I don't know, probably 150 kids that are up in above sixth grade. Above sixth grade, it becomes about $300 a year.

We're just trying to help them stay in school so that they become educated. I'll talk more just a bit about that later. So, what have we been doing while we've been over there? Again, this is a little bit for you that don't know what you're doing.

One of the things about our mission is that we've become convinced that if you want to share the gospel, you kind of have to do it in the heart language. Most Americans are really, I don't know what to say here, not too cool, I don't know, whatever you want to call it.

They're monolingual people. It's really rare to find monolingual people in the world. And Americans are one of them. You get over to Africa, they know three or four and they can't even read. But when I say that, they know Jula for the marketplace, but you could never reach them with the gospel in that language.

They know Chebada or they know some French, but that just gets them into the legal side of it. But you can't use that terminology when you're talking about God. God is a heart God, as we learned in Sunday school.

This morning. And he's a God of the heart and he wants us to know their heart. You have to speak their language, idiomatic language. So our goal is to do it in the language. That's one thing SIL tries to do with the translation.

We believe that God wants them to hear it in their language. Aren't you thankful it's in English? You know, instead of Greek, it'd be a whole lot harder. But the other thing is we're trying to establish churches.

We're different than SIL Wycliffe in that regard. We want to see a church established and that church establishing more churches. So now to be able to do that, you have to learn the language and you also have to do the translation.

So one of the things to do about learning language, I used to think it was a hard task sitting down and looking in the books like you do in high school. But if you get out with the people and you start talking to them, it's amazing how quickly some of those words can come.

So here's Denny. She was really good at that. One of the things I had to do was come up with the alphabet. Again, I'm sorry about this for those guys that were there at TAG. But here's the alphabet. And here's some things that are quick, easy to see, some of the differences, some of the sounds.

These are weird looking symbols. But if you know anything about the International Phonetic Symbols, it's not a problem. We have discovered, and this is not just us, but if you can come up with one symbol for one sound, you can teach a person to read their own language in six weeks, including English.

But English is written with about, you can have as many as five, ten symbols for a single sound. You know, when I cough, what's that? O-U-G-H. What is that? I mean, it's two sounds. It's a vowel and an F.

But that's what I'm saying, thought. Well, that changes the sound with a, you know, O-U-G-H. The vowel, well, that changes the sound, too. So all I'm saying is there's a whole lot of symbols and sounds that make it really hard to learn how to read English.

Not so in Palica. So my job was to come up with that. I'll have to say it wasn't necessarily easy because Palica didn't want to follow normal linguistic rules. There's some letters that we didn't use.

Down on the bottom we have a single symbol because it's also a tonal language. And I give the example so often of, I want you to hear the differences in these three phrases. Weikata jagana, weikata jagana, weikata jagana.

Okay, the first one means we will go to the house. The second one, we will not go to the house. And the last one means we didn't go to the house. And if you don't get it right, Jesus died for my sins.

He will die for my sins. He didn't die for my sins. And you can see where we're going. Okay, so now you kind of know what we do out there, where we're headed. I'm trying to give you an update from recently.

One of the things that happened in 2002 was there was an uprising. They've always been a democratic country since 1960, but they only had one political party. It works pretty well. But when you have multiple parties and they learned about it, they had 119 presidential candidates.

They weren't ready for it. And so they didn't like who was eventually chosen. That's another story. Denny actually shared the gospel with the president. So in 2002, there was a rebel uprising. They wanted elections all over again.

And they were shooting, fighting, and it wasn't a good situation. The mission pulled us out. We weren't really allowed back in, although we felt safe to go back in because they weren't after us. It was a political thing.

So we did finally get out there in 2007. But what had happened, well, we were gone for those five years is that the rebels came in and took everything that we had. Our houses were totally stripped. The rebels came in.

I mean, who's going to pay a rebel, right? So they would steal wherever they could. But when the villagers saw that they were taking our things, they came in as well and made sure there was nothing left.

I'm saying this because we've had all these incidents, but there was an incident in which it just became very clear to us that we would believe in your God, too, if we had the money to take care of our kids when they got sick.

We had things, and they didn't. And, of course, it became more of a white man's religion and we don't have what you have. And I did wonder, God, what's it going to take to reach them? You going to take one of my kids like every one of their families?

You going to take all that we have that they had? So we went out in 2007, and you can see Denny cooking outside because we no longer had a stove and a fridge. And the thing was, they came to us and said, when are we going to start work?

I said, well, we can't pay you. What? I said, no, we're going to have to pray. I said, and we don't have our coworkers with us either. So you are our coworkers. And to see them start praying with us and to see us on the same page now as coworkers, but it took the loss of everything and what happened there too is that our coworker wasn't coming back.

So Denny was given the job of translating the New Testament at the age of 50. So you guys that don't think that you're getting older, you can still do quite a bit. Another thing that happened is Denny had been working one-on-one with a guy that was really sharp and she decided to create a team, which to this day, she started finding out that creating a team was basically a discipleship program and they learned more than just how to translate.

So now the last we saw you was in 2015. We go out in 2016 and we were caught off guard. This is more Denny's story probably than mine, but it was hitting both of us. She thought she was nearly losing her mind.

Come six, seven o 'clock when the sun is going down, just pace around the house up to five hours, nearly feeling like she's going to lose her mind, trying to remember how to spell the names of her kids.

Bad, bad. Do you call it satanic? Do you call it, what do you call it? I'm not, I don't know, but I really thought we were leaving. This wasn't the first time it happened, but each of the times it happened, it seems like when she was starting again, the translation, this kind of thing came up.

And so for me, I got out there and I'd sent about up to, slowly sent out about $5 ,000 over the period of time to a missionary. I thought he was holding it for me. No, he was putting it into our decrepit car and because he was using our car and I, we were $8 ,000 in the hole and didn't know what we were going to do.

But anyway, what was interesting is from eight to five, Denny had a very clear mind and was working on translation. 2017, there's a team that came basically from England. They were former missionaries.

They wanted to come out and they actually put up this church building. Our mission, our believers had been living, had been having church under a tree for 17 years. So they put up this church building.

You can see a little lean to cut and shelter out in front. That's where they have Sunday school for the kids. It's kind of cool to watch them, but they didn't want to have distractions in the church building.

What's the church service look like? You're watching the church, first church service inside the building here. They create their own songs. The church is extra long. They do their teaching from up front, but this whole middle circle is where the ladies dance, but it's not a central type dance.

They love the Lord. All their songs, they created on their own. They're usually verses. As they're singing, keep in mind, they don't know how to read their own language. The language had never been written down.

They're just now learning how to read it. This is how they remember it. It's kind of cool to see the kids singing as they go out to the field. It's neat how that works. One of the things about 2017 was, I'd been now spending my time trying to get the house up and going and a lot of other extras.

2017 came along. We sat down with our leadership, came up with a great strategy. I was really looking forward to it. Two missionary families wanted to join our work. Today, we really wish maybe they had, but we also realized that if we could say no to them, they would start another language group.

We were hoping that the Palika would be our team sufficiently enough. With that strategy statement, I was really counting on Sibri to be a huge help. We weren't counting on him passing away. He was educated enough in school that he could go straight from English to Palika.

He did a rough translation of the New Testament once he'd worked with Denny and gave Denny a running start at a lot of this stuff. He could help me almost immediately write down any Palika word. Now I'm having to come up with a spell checker and it's a whole lot harder because he's not there to do it.

He was a great teacher. You can see him there on the left. He was one of the teachers. It was like losing three missionaries all at one time. 2018, and I brought in Chris and Josh. They stopped in for about three weeks on their way to France where they were going to learn French before coming back.

When he stopped in, it was neat that the day before he arrived, we just didn't have the wherewithal to ship the thing, make the shipment in 2016. 2018, the shipment arrived and Josh put up our panels.

Oh my goodness, to have enough power to run a small freezer and to have fans at night and to be able to run six computers during the daytime instead of generators, that was huge. You can see at the bottom there we had a baptism.

Now we had them ask the questions and determine who should be saved and who needed more teaching. That was an interesting ordeal. How do you know that somebody's saved? How do you teach somebody to find out?

What was even more interesting was our kids. Our sons came out at that time. You can see one of our sons, probably about 30 at the time, getting baptized along with his new wife. 2019 was very heavy. One of the first things was that we had our first women's conference.

Denny can tell you a little bit more about that. The same team that put up the church came out and put in a floor. It was a whole lot heavier. Denny completed. She got her final check.

What in the world?

Is this a chair here? Thank you. Denny got her final check.

She was able to print.

The New Testament in September. Right after that, a team came in and gave us a brand new literacy program and worked with our language. We had brand new materials here. They're also on the table. Here's the New Testament if you want to come read it.

We have a few other things too. Anyway, that's kind of bringing you up to date real quick. The thing that's been interesting one of the things that I also didn't show you was after, in December, Denny had gotten from a neighboring translator.

She'd gotten the idea that maybe it'd be good to read through the whole New Testament and create an audio recording. That's going on while people are learning to read. Josh gave us a great professional recorder.

She starts recording, but she wasn't counting on the fact that one of the guys on her team had saved guys. Wow, we haven't heard that. What's that mean? Turn off the recorder? Explain it? Turn on the recorder?

One verse later? What does that mean? Turn off the recorder? She didn't get the audio done. She realized it would still probably be good to finish this. After finishing Mark, the same guy went and he did what none of the other sacrifices to get saved.

Oh no, they're old. They're going to die. They're too hardened in their ways. Forget about it. This guy, his name is Penitibi. He goes and invites them to come in for a check. He said, you guys know all the language.

You guys might be able to help us with old words if that's helpful. Will you come in and listen? Here's the guy that's offering up a chicken sacrifice at a wedding. Same guy. That's the whole gospel of Luke.

Getting through two books, we came home on furlough. Now we have a brand new literacy program. We have the New Testament completed but not printed. We have these guys that are listening. Then he said, this is the end of 2019.

Maybe we should break up our home assignment and go back out for three months and try to wrap some of this stuff up. Let's finish the audio and get all the printing stuff ready. Then we'll come back home for home assignment.

We weren't counting on COVID. We were only home about two months. COVID hit. We were already corresponding with Brother Michael about coming down here. The governor just said, maybe better to wait. Our admissions said, man, we can't count home assignment for you guys because you can't travel.

While we're waiting and waiting for everything to open up, including airports, when it finally opened in October, we just took off and let's see if we can get this done. We were out there from October to May.

I won't go into some of the details. We got held up. Basically, our mission was nervous, found out that we were going out there and weren't too happy because of the militants. They really wanted us to stay at the Baptist Hospital where Chris and Josh were.

We didn't mind hanging out with our grandkids, but it really made the work hard because we weren't with the people. Anyway, the deal is, what's God been doing? He's softening hearts. We started hearing stories all over the place in other villages.

Not only that, other denominations were getting in on the fun. They were finding believers of their own. You get a little bit jealous. We're the ones that have it right. Here I show Seabody again, but we now have five regular teachers going to other villages.

You talk about who's a missionary. What I said to the kids at TAG is, everybody is. Personally, I don't feel it's a call to go overseas. We're commanded to go. I would just invite you guys to say, okay God, where do you want me to go?

It may be as far as next door. You know what I'm saying? Just make sure you're not the one calling the shots on that. The women's conference, this picture here, was taken after we left?

No.

This one here was this year. The women, first week, you need to see this here. You need to see this panya. It's called a panya. It's a wraparound that the women use. They put it on their heads, wrap it around.

Southern Baptist missionary put all the foundational Bible teaching stories on it. I said second year about the New Testament. This year it was, we need to learn how to teach each other. They get up there just sweating.

Some of them had to get help to read the lessons. This is my lesson. It was a mess because the gal that assigned the stories wasn't there to give them the order. They're all out of order. I can't tell you how messy it got.

Here they were in fear and trembling, standing up in front of the rest of the ladies telling these stories. It's just their, oh come on. They have a little march around the village. It's very typical that you do this kind of thing.

Singing their songs. A few kids wearing their COVID masks. You can hear the xylophone. They have a much bigger version than this one here at the table.

It's about that big.

They're all believers. They love the Lord. They have three wheelers that act like little pickup trucks for them. Missionary come out. Sorry. A friend come out from Wisconsin that had been supporting us off and on over the years and wanted to come out and see what we're doing and saw God in these people.

Remember, these guys haven't seen a church. They haven't seen how to do church. It's interesting to watch what the Holy Spirit does. When you see them dancing, wait, wait, wait. Dancing's out. With all our programs, we're hanging onto the bumper saying, God, where are we going?

To sit here and brag, I'm just, God, tomorrow I may fall flat and I'm going to look like a fool. You know what I'm saying? When God shows up, it's like,.

Oh, yay.

This Penitibi, he also is wild about getting people reading. He would fill up one of those three wheelers, at night, in the dark, arrive at another village where there are students home on break and come up with about as many as 100 people in that village thinking that if we can get literacy, if we can get literacy going with the students who can read quicker, that might give greater motivation for those that can't read at all.

Here he is. He's become a real nightmare for us, for me, because I need this printed, I need that printed. Wait, wait, wait, and I don't want to just be giving money out left and right, but if we can help with gas to get them to these different places or for printing materials, they just don't have the money for some of that stuff, and it's just become really hard.

This here was just taken a week ago outside in the church courtyard, and these are all students from other villages that have come in, and only about 10, maybe 10, 15 from each of these villages have come in, and this is Penitivi.

Penitivi was the one that also went and grabbed the village leaders, and this supporter I was telling you about came out and visited for the summer, and she looks at us and she says, I don't know why me and my husband are supporting you guys.

It seems like you're not really doing anything. It's all God. She was dead serious, but I wish you could see that. I wish you could see that. Denny's going to talk to us a little bit. Let me just give you one more thing.

I was really struggling with the fact that our mission wouldn't let us go back out in the village when there didn't seem to be any visible reason why the militants were actually an issue. At least the people themselves didn't show any fear of the issue, and we should be able to be in the village and working with them.

Then he said, well, why don't we just grab my team? We'll rent a house, which was rather cheap, and put my team in that for the week, and we'll bring in people and so we have to finish. She'd only done Mark and Luke, and she's doing the read-through, and she doesn't know who's going to show up.

This Penitentiary guy was doing the same thing. So she would go in, and oh my goodness, we're in Hebrews today, and I've got Muslims. If you know anything about the Muslim faith, Jesus was no more than a prophet.

You put him up there in the place of the Son of God, and that he's better than everybody, like it says in Hebrews? So he went out, and after a couple days, this guy says, man, I think somebody's giving me a line about the Muslim faith, and it was just neat to see that kind of thing happen.

Another guy comes in. He's real good in the French Bible, and he had been taught real well in the educational system. Doesn't say that in the French. You can't have that, and then he let the team do the talking.

So he said, so how do you want us to say it? We want to get it right. And that happened time and time again when they saw that we wanted to get it right, and they could be a part of it. It was huge. It even got, these guys don't even have a sixth grade education.

They've got ones that are working with Denny, and we ended up in the Canton Chief's house. Now, this Canton Chief is responsible for all the decisions for the whole area. The region is called Canton. So he was a chief over everybody.

If he made a decision, that was the last word. He happened to be sick that day. He said, normally I wouldn't take anybody here, but because he had relationships in our village, yeah, come on. And he invited all the village leaders in to see us.

Now, only about eight showed up. These guys did the same thing. They were reading in Revelation of all places, wanting a checkbook back. And so these guys that all showed up, leaders and everything, they know the old Palico words, right?

And so let's get this good Palico.

In there.

And so they're making suggestions. But then this Canton Chief says, wait, you guys, if we use those old words, only you guys are going to be able to read the Bible. We better use the words that we're actually moving to, which some of them were a language, Jula, that is coming in, but they're used all the time.

So let's use words that everybody uses. And at the end of the day, all these chiefs are just, we had a guy show up. I showed you the guy that was sacrificing chickens. His son is next in line to do that job.

He is, oh man, if there's anybody in anybody's courtyard you want to avoid, it's his. Angry all the time. You don't want to get, you're always on his wrong side. And Pentatebe, he invites him to come and be a checker.

You got to be kidding. And he comes in, and as he gets involved with the process, anybody new that came in, these guys have done a good job. And he became a proponent of the word. Everybody that heard it became a proponent of the word, remember?

They were in all these other villages. I was having a hard time that we weren't allowed to go back and into the village. Our mission has lost missionaries because of Muslim militants and others. And they get a lot of feedback from families in the states that are wanting to sue because the mission hasn't been taking the proper precautions.

I was struggling. But here's Denny over at this other house, and here's what God's doing. So anyway, Denny, I told Denny just to share some of the things that she, that are personally encouraging to her.

I need to switch to the prayer request.

All right, doing our little planning here on the side. Can I turn the lights on then?

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I think Vern did a really good job.

Of answering.

Did you guys have any questions about anything that you heard so far tonight? I can see if I can try to answer some of your questions.

Mr. Smith?

Vern mentioned at several points about the influence of Islam.

So the northern part of Ivory Coast is known to be more Muslim, and the southern half would tend to be more Catholic. And we have seen a change over the last few years. There's more masks coming in, and a lot more people, the women wearing the burqas, and there's a real strict sect that has come in.

So far, we haven't known the Muslims to be aggressive like what we've heard in other places. But our son, Matt, had been in the military years ago, and he used to sort of monitor things when we were there.

And he said, don't be so foolish as to think that there aren't training camps near you guys there in the north. He said, just keep your heads up and be aware, be wise. So that's the thing, I guess, with terrorism.

You can't always predict when and where it's going to hit. So for now, we feel like the door is still open, and so that's why there is a push for us to finish up and get the scripture to them if the door is going to close at some point.

We'd like to get it done as soon as we can.

They actually had an attack down real close to the capital city in 2016, but we found out they were going after the American ambassador. He just didn't happen to show up. So because he didn't show up, they just started gunning people.

Down there on the beach.

It's a tourist place.

They were missionaries.

So they couldn't pull that off. As far as the Muslim faith, most of the Africans really believe in the spirits, and they grab onto either the Catholic faith or the Muslim faith kind of as a cover. I think a lot of them don't want to be looked at as pagan, and so they'll have a secondary covering, so they'll walk out of their church.

Our believers laugh at it now. We used to walk out of church and go off for sacrifices. I never see what they saw.

On their parents.

I actually helped them make a change to love the Lord. They call it folk Islam, folk Catholicism because it's got a mixture. Sometimes the best imam is also the one that offers chicken sacrifices.

Going by what we see happening in Burkina, it's the Christians and the churches that are being attacked there just north of us. I told our believers about that, that these things were going on because they're not always aware of what the news is.

We spoke with them, and I said to Verna, in our church, in the Palika church, the women all sit on one side of the church, and the men sit on the other side of the church. I was sitting among the women, and we were in Philippians, this was the first time they were hearing it.