A Church in the desert practicing the Fundamentals of the Faith.
Missionaries
Dear Pastor and Co-Laborers in Christ:
Christmas and New Year greetings to each and every one of you! We rejoice together with you as we remember the coming of our Savior into the world, and we thank God for your faithfulness in supporting the work of proclaiming the Good News here in Southwest Nrw Britian. Your prayers and financial gifts ARE making a differerence!
Translation
Last month two Bible consultants came from the U.S. to check the book of Acts. We praise God that we were able to complete the check in the very limited time they had with us. So now Mark, Acts and Galations have been final checked. That's 23.5% of the New Testament! Matthew, Luke, John, Roman, Ephesians and half of the book of Revelation are trans lated and ready for checking by the local Kaulong churches. Half of Matthew and Luke are already checked by the Kaulong believers(that's nearly another 14%). We are currently in the process of doing a literal translation of Matthew back into english(called a back translation) so that it can be checked by a Bible tranlation consultant, hopefully in May. Once the rest of the books mentioned at the begining of this paragraph also pass the Kaulong check, they can also be back translated into English. We hope to complete all the final checking of those books by the end of 2011(bringing the total to 75% of the New Testament).Meanwhile,the final push to translate the remaining Pualine Epistles and the General Epistles is scheduled to begin in June, 2011. We hope to complete the translation of all the epistles by mid 2012. That leaves us almost a year to finish the rest of the checking.
Once everything is checked it can be submitted for computer typesetting and publication. Our goal is to take the completed Kaulong New Testament home for typesetting and printing in May 2013, when our daughter will be graduating from high school.
Church Planting
Our two church plants are continueing to meet at least weekly. The Angelek church is meeting on it's own for the most part. I meet with the leadres every three weeks for training purposes. We still have not appointed leaders at the Kandrian airport church. We expect to do so in the near future after we have completed some basic teaching.Family
Craig has had very little trouble with his kidney stones and has had the strength and stamina for some long motorcycle trips over unpaved roads to the bush for evangelistic Bible studies and training of church leaders. Praise the Lord!Please pray for Linda, Kathrine and Daniel who have been fighting various health problems. We will be traveling to the "big city" for doctors appiontments in mid December. Please pray for wisdom for the doctors.
Prayer Requests
We would like to ask for your renewed commitment in the area of prayer, especially over the next three years. During that time we hope by God's grace to achieve the following goals:- Complete the translation,checking, typesetting, printing and initial distribution of the Kaulong New Testament.
- Complete the basic discipleship training for new believers in the now two, but hopefully by then four churches that we have planted.
- Complete the Kaulong primer and graded readers, and the first round of adult literacy classes and teachers training.
- Finish basic training for the first group of Kaulong church leaders so that they can continue training the other church leaders.
- Relocate to the main island of PNG and set up a small, decentralized, local church based network for Bible translation, Scripture in use and Biblical theological training.
So, to get to the bottom line, would you be willing to recommit yourself to intercessory prayer for the achievement of the above goals, all, of coarse, sublect to the Lord's will? We would be very grateful, indeed, if you would. We, for our part, will commit to doing our best to keep you informed of the "details" so that you can be praying for specific needs. If any of you would like to recieve more frequent prayer updates by email, please so indicate by sending us an email from the email address to which you would like the email updates sent. Pleas send your email directly to us at the following email address: craig_throop@crmf.org.pg(please note that we can only recieve emails up to 50k in size).
Thank you again for standing with us in the past. May God richly bless you you and protect you spiritually and in every other way in the coming year, as we uphold each other in prayer before the throne of grace.