Mission Partner Update - The Williamsons, October 2024

Teaching in "S" village! 

After nearly 5 years in the M village, the Iski church is getting ready to head across river and start teaching the Bible lessons in the creation to Christ teaching. What is the creation to Christ teaching? As you know, when our team first moved into Iski in 2014 and began teaching in 2017 we didn’t start right off with the gospel message, but instead had to lay foundations. Think about it: How would someone understand John 3:16 without first understanding who God is, who we are, and why we need a Savior? We started in Genesis, teaching about God as the creator of everything, including mankind. This challenged the Iski people’s traditional beliefs about their origins. Different clans believed they came from things like birds, bamboo, or holes in the ground. As the ‘Creation to Christ’ teaching progressed, we continued through the Old Testament, building a foundation for the Iski to understand the promised Deliverer. From the fall of man, we traced God’s promises through the Law, the prophets, and the lives of God’s chosen people. Everything pointed toward this coming Deliverer. 

These are the same lessons that the Iski church is getting ready to teach. While they have taught many individuals and groups over the years, it has all been within the general community around our "M" village. However because of the difficulty of crossing the river (a bit wider than a football field) and the lack of canoes, the people of "S" village have mostly been unable to hear or be involved in any of the teaching. They have recently given an invitation for our church to come over and teach them. To that end, I have been working with our Bible teachers and Elders over the past weeks and months to get them ready for this huge undertaking. This will be their first creation to Christ teaching to another village that they will do on their own without me there. 

How can you be praying? Well, though there is interest in them coming, the area where they will hold the teaching is near another large religious group. This group has been in the Iski area for many years and as you can imagine, our plans to come teach has caused some of them to be concerned. This has caused some fear and hesitancy in some to come to the teaching. So, the Bible teachers and I have decided that they should start with a short 10 lesson summary of the creation to Christ teaching, then determine if there there is ample interest to continue. The teachers have marked this coming Monday (the 4th) to start teaching. Will you put that on your calendar and begin to pray God will remove any fear or hesitation that people may have and that the leaders of the other religious group will not prevent anyone from coming?

Literacy Class #14! 
The big precursor to our creation to Christ teaching is running our vernacular literacy program. Before our arrival, the Iski language had never been written down. This meant starting from scratch, carefully analyzing sounds, word structures, and grammatical patterns to create an alphabet and a system of writing that truly reflected the language as spoken. Then we had to develop a literacy program that carefully taught them how to read and write that language for themselves. We really wanted the Iski to be able to read God's message for themselves and have confidence in the written word. That was nearly 9 years ago our team developed these tools and trained the first group of 16 people. Over the years, these people have taught 13 literacy classes in two different locations. 

Before agreeing to come teach in "S" village, our teachers taught literacy class #14 in that location. The class is 16 weeks long and starts with recognizing basic sound clusters and slowly moves into joining syllables and reading words and eventually reading sentences. In September, Nisae and I were able to attend the graduation of that class and hear those students (many who are full grown adults in their 40's and even 50's with a 6th grade education or less) stand in front of everyone and read stories they had written. Pray with us that God will use this ability in their lives to help them read the written Word of God and understand more about their Creator!

Your co-laborers,
Jason & Nisae Williamson