Our family is from northeastern Vermont and was involved in life and ministry in our community there. In late 2012/early 2013, we were praying for friends of ours who were training to be tribal church planters with Ethnos360 (formerly New Tribes Mission). In April 2013, we went to Ethnos360’s exposure program in Pennsylvania called Wayumi so that we could better understand what tribal church planting is and to see if that was something God was leading us toward. After leaving Wayumi, we were ready to say as a family that we would go as God opened the doors for us. God faithfully opened doors for us to be able to go. We had the privilege of training at Ethnos Canada’s training center, and we graduated in December of 2015.
In January of 2017, we moved to Papua New Guinea to be part of a church planting team there. After finishing our field orientation in July of 2017, we remained at the field orientation center to help facilitate the next two orientation classes. In May of 2018, we joined the Tanguat work. The Tanguat work began in 2011 with missionaries partnering with the Inapang church to reach the Tanguat language group of about 1,500 people. In 2017, the Inapang church elders requested help for the Tanguat work as they had lost one of the two missionaries that were helping them with translation and Bible lessons. The Inapang elders were also seeing a great need for discipleship for the young Tanguat church as the Gospel was presented in 2015, but there was no one available to invest in the discipleship of the believers. A group of men who were bilingual had started off with discipleship but had fallen away from the Lord. Our family and Derek and Chantal Chen and their family joined Promise Vaughan and the Inapang church to see the Tanguat church brought to maturity. We are currently involved in literacy, Bible lesson development, translation, discipleship, and helping train the young Tanguat church to be able to take the Gospel to the other Tanguat villages who have yet to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ.