World Mission
Holy Trinity has mission partners working long term in different parts of the world and at any one time there are usually several others working on short term projects around the globe.
Penny Bakewell is working with SIM in northern Ghana on health education & Bible teaching among the Sisala people, particularly women. From her base in the town of Tumu Penny has established a wide-ranging ministry in the town and to outlying villages. A recent success is the rapid increase in the numbers of children attending the church in Tumu and Penny is planning to establish a children's service in response. With Penny's encouragement and support local women have started to come forward to lead devotions and Bible studies.
Colin Bearup is working on translating the Bible into Chadian Arabic and visits Chad twice a year for six weeks. He has established a vast range of contacts throughout Chad. The translation work cracks on apace: Luke has recently been completed.
Claude Scott has recently returned from Uvira in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR) where he ran a week's seminar for 120 pastors of the Assemblies of God church. He had lived there as a boy with his missionary parents and, a year ago, had been able to visit their home and many churches his father had established. Pastors came from all over DCR for biblical training and Claude focussed his teaching sessions on the use of an African Bible Commentary. This had been written by African pastors for African pastors, and had only just been translated into Swahili, a language used widely in East Africa. It has a strong emphasis on applying biblical teaching to the African cultural context, and proved to be a really effective resource. The pastors thoroughly enjoyed working in groups to study the books of Ruth (Old Testament) and Ephesians (New Testament) using worksheets Claude had prepared. This was a novel approach to learning for them, and many vowed to adopt it themselves in their own contexts! Claude intends to return to DCR next year to conduct a ‘train the trainers' seminar across many denominations, using the same book, so that pastors can themselves train others, and thus leave a self-managing process in place.
Tony & Carol Smith are working with Wycliffe translating the Bible into the Muyang language in Cameroon. This is really going well now with most of the New Testament translated apart from some minor epistles and Romans. The translation team are cracking on with this latter and chapters 1-6 are now ready for checking. They have also prepared some books of Old Testament Bible stories which should be printed over the next few months.