Report from EMU International

I'm just going to stand here to begin with and because we're going to go right into the slides. I do have a question.

This church supports the Bixby's. Were they here last summer? Well, that was the last summer.

This is like my wife. We do this all the time. That's right. Yeah, that's anyway. Okay, so they were here in 2023. Okay, and they presented their ministry. Okay, so I won't take quite as much time with them. And I just wasn't sure about that. And we'll go ahead and you've already got it going.

Most of our literature is EMU International. It was not always. Okay. Clickers not clicking.

Does it need to be turned on? Okay. The Dayballs went to Uruguay in 1946. So we're going to go back. I was told there was a delay on this clicker.

And there's a little bit more delay than I anticipated. Okay, the Dayballs went to Uruguay in 1946. Fred Daybald had been a pastor in the pastorate with his wife for about 20 years, and mainly in the Midwest and all the way out to California. And they had always had a burden for missions. And in about 1944, the Lord laid it on their heart to enter mission work. And they went to New Tribes Mission training. And they thought they were going to go to jungle areas or to China.

But they ended up because of a number of different circumstances, they ended up in Uruguay, which there are no jungles, there are no tribal people there. And but the Lord guided them there. And in the early years of, in fact, the first two or three years of their ministry there, they first started teaching Americans, or English speaking people who were in Montevideo, and a young man named Freddie Miller, who was Czechoslovakian immigrant. He spoke English and Spanish. And he came to the services on Friday night, and he loved them so much that he started inviting his friends who were Spanish speaking. And so he interpreted for them. And so they were holding bilingual services. And very, very soon after that, just a couple years, many of the young people said, Mr. Daybal, we would like for you to teach us the Bible in more depth and more times during the week. At this time, there was not a church. It was just a Friday night Bible study.

And but the Lord bless this just absolutely amazingly. In those early years, the Daybals established the goals of the mission, and it was to reach Uruguay with diversified evangelism, and you'll see how we do that. And to establish fundamental Bible believing indigenous churches throughout the country, and to establish a Bible Institute for the training of the nationals. And in 1950, the mission was incorporated in the United States and in Uruguay as evangelical mission to Uruguay. And this is the name that my parents were always under when I think they were here. The mission began in just the country of Uruguay, about three and a half million people, half of the people live in the southern capital of Montevideo. It is a beautiful city, very It's modern in some areas, and there's also a lot of very old architecture.

In this picture right here, I'm not going to point them all out, but there are seven different modes of transportation represented here. And it's, it's amazing from modern to old. Education is free through the university level. And so when the Daybals went there, about 95% of the population could read and write.

And so they had no problem with handing out tracts and Gospels of John, and people being able to read it. Hospitalization is socialized so it's, they say it's free but it really isn't. But if you want decent health care, you have an insurance policy and pay a doctor a little bit more. It's a three party system. And for many years until about five years ago, four years ago, it was a communist government that was elected.

And, but for the most recent years now it's the Communist Party was voted out. But all through all of this time, Uruguay has been a free country. They're, they're very covetous and proud of the freedom that they have.

So the government has never interfered with our ministries. Catholicism is the main religion. About 40% of the people claim to be Catholic. Most of the people are simply humanist, even the Catholics are humanist. We have a number of churches throughout the country and I'm not going to name the pastors but just to give you an idea of the ministries, the churches that we have down in Uruguay, the congregation there, and all these pastors are nationals. We do have two American couples that are down there. John Mark is the director of the Bible Institute, and he also teaches at FABU.

FABU, I'm not going to give you the Spanish name for that because it wouldn't make sense to you and we always call it FABU anyway. But that is the Bible College that was established in Uruguay. It's a higher educational level than the Bible Institute.

It's a lot more requirements. And Matias Espinel is the director of that school. That was started as a consortium of a number of different fundamental mission boards.

And so those are the only two Americans we have down there. The FERIA was a ministry that was started very, very early on in the Dayballs ministry. FERIA means open air market and Montevideo has the largest open air market in all of South America. There are over 50,000 people who visit there every Sunday morning.

It's absolutely amazing. And you can buy anything. And a lot of people go down there to shop every Sunday morning. And I think in the first year that the Dayballs were down there, they realized nobody was giving the gospel out and so many people here. And so they started handing out tracts first of all and eventually they were able to rent a corner on the main street and began holding services, preaching, handing out tracts, literature, witnessing to people on the street.

And that has been going on since probably 1947. Other churches just outside of Montevideo and Pondo and prison ministry as well in the south. We used to have one in the north.

I don't think it's going on anymore. Child evangelism is very strong throughout the country with our different churches. And it's a good way to get into homes and get the gospel to parents who would never come to church.

In the interior of Uruguay, which is basically cattle country, we have a number of churches there. By the way, this bird is called an emu and we get a lot of razz about it. This is not the, it's spelled emu.

Pardon? It's not our mascot. Yeah, it's not our mascot, but it's, although an emu does look a little bit like me in the face.

And what you will see everywhere ubiquitous is the green parrot. They are just, there's a gazillion of them down there. But we have another number of churches in the interior. And you'll notice that almost all these churches are called Calvary Temple. And they just named them after the mother church in Montevideo. They liked the name and so they kept it for the other churches that were established in the interior. Up in the Brazilian border, which is the furthest north that we have a church now, is Calvary Temple of Rivera.

Very strong work. Down in the south along the, it's called the Rio de la Plata. You go to the Rio de la Plata and it seems like the ocean.

They've got waves, it's salty water, but it's considered a river. We have one of our three camps. This is our largest, Camp Emmanuel.

It started in 1965, the year before I got into the mission. Mario Rodonze is the camp director. He's also the administrator of our mission in Uruguay.

Just one of the smartest guys I've ever met. And just a dear friend too. And Beatrice, in the white jacket, is his secretary at the camp. And she has worked for the camp for several decades as the secretary and has never taken a dime in pay. It's all volunteer work.

And she is just a real godsend. It's a gorgeous piece of property. Buildings were erected early on and the ministries were started back at that time.

Lord provided for a beautiful chapel. We have, it's very, the program now is very much like what goes on at the wilds. It's not quite as glitzy as that. But there are children's camps and junior high camps. There's high school. It's right, it's about one kilometer from the beach.

You can just walk down there and it's just, it's a beautiful, beautiful place. Family camps we have there every year. And we also rent this property for other basically church group or school groups to come and hold camps as well. And then every year we have our missionary conference for evangelical mission to Uruguay. And all these people here are Uruguayans except for the man in the orange who is our current director. Tim was the speaker that year. Is Tim up there? Yep, Tim. Okay, that's Tim Chapman? Yeah.

Okay, I can't see him. That's, that's Tom and Connie's boy, but we'll get to that in a minute. So it went from evangelical mission to Uruguay. And then the mission has been through three eras, really, and it was the era of Paul Deball, and then the era of my dad and that that's where really tremendous teaching got instituted and to the Bible Institute and to the churches. And then in 1988, we took our first missionary under our mission that did not go to Uruguay.

And that was Tom and Connie. And they are in Antofagasta, Chile. It's right on the Pacific coast. And it's on the edge of the driest desert in the world, the Atacama. And in the interior, they do a lot of mining and the mining material in order for it to get shipped out goes through Antofagasta.

And so Antofagasta is the port for that. This is the largest open pit mine in the world. It is quite amazing. First, when they went to Antofagasta, they rented homes, and I was in several of those, but then the Lord allowed them to buy a piece of property right next to the rocks. Now, right on the other side of these rocks are, is the ocean. And everybody in Antofagasta, probably 300,000 people, they know where this rock is. It's a landmark. And they were able to buy this property and take down the edifice that was there. It was just, it was a wreck and build this very comfortable house. And it's really a nice place.

It's not glitzy. It's just a comfortable place for them. And this is the area that they established their church. The young man here preaching is Daniel Salvatierra. The Salvatierra family was one to the Lord very early on in the Chapman's ministry.

And the four, there were four brothers had tremendous voices. And they were, anyway, the Chapman's helped two of these boys get Christian education up at, it's called Ucla. It's UCLA, but it's Ucla and Monterey. It's a Christian college up there. And two of the boys, including Daniel here, got their degrees up there. And then they came back and eventually Daniel here became the pastor of the church.

The church was able to buy a very nice piece of property. It's pretty large, but there's no structure on it to hold everybody. They are actually meeting in a tent here. And they have been for a number of years. The climate in Antofagasta, it almost never rains. It's never too cold.

It's usually not too hot. And so they're fine meeting in a tent like this. And so they're saving their money to build a building.

And the Lord has very greatly blessed that ministry. The Chapman's will be home next week on furlough. And we hope to have them in our home in about two weeks. They'll be staying with us.

And I hope they'll be visiting your church here. Their son, their second son, Tim, and his wife Cheryl, and you see Tom and Connie in this picture. Tim and Cheryl used to travel with the Pettit team.

They did for several years. And after a number of years, they felt called to go to Lima and start actually a camp. But when they got down to Lima, they found that the price of property down there was just absolutely astronomical. And so after a number of years of trying and looking for property, they changed their emphasis to starting a church in downtown Lima. And the Lord has just abundantly blessed in that. Here too, they're renting a place, but it's under a tent.

And they don't need a building right now, although they are looking for one. The two men in the upper picture besides Tim, they are assistant pastors in the church. And Tim has taught these guys in sort of a Bible school setting.

And there are some others who are being taught right now. And the whole idea from this location is to teach young men how to plant churches and how to preach and teaching them doctrine and to go out into Peru and even other places in South America and establish churches. J.D. and Kim Crowley were the second family that came into our mission to a country other than Uruguay, and they went to ended up in Cambodia.

J.D. was a pastor in Hawaii for a number of years, and then he felt the Lord was calling him to go to a country that had the need for a Bible to be translated into it. And Cambodia had the greatest concentration of tribal people with no scripture. And so he and his family, I was going to say a family of six, but they didn't have six at the time. I think they had four, didn't they? By the time they went, they had five. They had five.

Okay. By the way, you'll see something about the families that are in Cambodia, children wise, as we go on. So the Crowley's went there and they went up. You see the city up there called Bun Lung, and that's where they lived. Cambodia is, of course, a very, very ancient country.

It's beautiful. It used to be almost all jungle, but now the jungles have almost all been cut down. And many of you remember Cambodia as the killing fields, and they are still recovering from that to some extent. There's a lot of prosperity in Cambodia now, but there's still a lot of poverty. Cambodia has the largest man-made temple in the world. And this is Angkor Wat. The Angkor complex has, oh, it's several hundred temples in it. And many of them were built by Hindus, but the country is officially Buddhist. Rice is the main production. I have a lot of export of that. Although there are some nicer grocery stores in the big cities, people generally shop at outdoor markets like this. Some people have a John Deere.

This is a John Water Buffalo. But the Kralis started working with the Tampuan tribe, and they did not even have a written language. The JD had to, what we call it, break the language, reduce it to writing, develop an alphabet, write primers so that the people could be taught to read and write in their own language.

They didn't have it because they had no books. And so he did that for a number of years, and when he got far enough along with his, he also produced a dictionary for the Tampuan people. He turned over his material to, it's a group with Wycliffe, and they were more able to more quickly translate the Bible, which has already been done. And so JD got into translating other material. When I say Khmer, Khmer is the main language in Cambodia, and the Khmer are the largest tribe in Cambodia, and so people call them Cambodians. But it's the Khmer. And so JD speaks Khmer fluently, and there was very little literature, Christian literature, in Khmer, and the communists had destroyed almost everything back in the time of the Khmer Rouge. And so he began translating material, Christian material, into the Khmer language. And he translated a series that was put out by New Tribes Mission, it was called Firm Foundation, and we refer to it as Creation to Christ. It's for societies who have absolutely no understanding of creator God, let alone who Jesus is. They know none of it, and so you have to take them from Genesis to the cross, because the cross doesn't make any sense to people who have no idea what sin is or who a creator God is.

They don't know. And so he translated this work, and it has been used just incredibly, not only in Cambodia, but in areas in the world where there are Khmer communities, and to teach people who Christ is. And so that has been greatly used. JD has written a number of books, many of them commentaries that are both English and Khmer. And so he did a great work there, is doing a great work there. In the summer of 2002, Joshua, our son, who knew the Crowley's because he grew up in our family and he knew our missionaries. And he was interested in doing translation work. He was still at Bob Jones at the time, a lower level undergrad, and he wanted to visit JD. And two of his friends who were in grad school heard about it, and they said, can we go too?

And he said, sure, come on. And so this is them. They did clown around a lot too.

The trash day, nobody comes and picks up your trash, you bury your trash. And so that's what they were doing here. The first of those three guys to end up in Cambodia was Brian Kane. He was the first to get his master's degree, and he went to Cambodia. And he is currently working with the Krung language. By the way, he has seven children, and they work with a Krung church, in fact, several Krung churches also. Krung is a tribe in that area.

He is also working on publishing the Krung New Testament, hopefully, at the beginning of 2024. The second person to end up there of those three was Jeremy Farmer after he got his doctorate in Old Testament theology. He and his wife went there with their children. They have eight kids, right?

Okay, eight kids. And they went not to work with a tribe, but they went to work with the Laotian people. You see Laos at the very top there of Cambodia. And thousands and thousands of Laotians have come into Cambodia because Laos is still a communist country.

And so there's a lot of Lao who live in northern Cambodia, and they had no work among them. And so Jeremy and Bonnie Ruth went there to minister to them. And they've got two pretty good works going on right now. And the Lord is really blessed. And you know these guys. Very Cambodian.

Everybody's barefoot. They are working in, you see, in the green country there. Way over on the upper right is Oyedao. And that is where they minister. After Josh got his Ph.D. in linguistics and after Amy got her doctorate in education, they raised support, took them two years, and they went to Cambodia. And Josh had already known that he wanted to work with the Jarai tribe.

He already did some preliminary work with them in an earlier visit he did with J.D. So they got there. And within, this is their home in Oyedao. And that's a typical home in Oyedao.

They live very much like the Cambodian people do. And that's quite a jungle gem, isn't it, that the kids get to play on. And this is a Jarai village.

It's sort of a step down economically from Oyedao. But that's basically the people he's ministering to. And this is Josh shopping in the market, or they have to. They have been, Josh has been doing Jarai Bible translation work since, I think, 2016. And the Lord has greatly blessed these men and women are on his translation team for making sure that what is being translated can be understood by the people. Translation work is just absolutely horrendous.

I don't know how anybody does it, but Josh loves it. And there's another lady who is from South Korea who is also helping with another group of Jarai people who live in a different city. That's her at the far right. Oh, okay.

That's her. And this other group is also working on the same Bible translation. And so they have good communication with each other.

And so they're not redundant, but they do overlap. Josh and Amy and their family attended Jarai Church and are very involved in it. And Josh has helped start Jarai Bible School there.

It started out with the Creation to Christ lessons. And when I say Bible school, this is not a going for weeks and weeks and weeks for a semester. A Bible school there is about three to four days, and it's very intense.

Everybody comes to an area and they live there. And it's very intense Bible study. But almost all of these people, all the pastors and the helpers in the churches are farmers. And so they have fields to look after. And so they have to have the Bible schools. They're usually twice a year.

And they're during the off season when there's not quite as much work to do in the fields. And so that's what a Bible school is in Cambodia. Amy has several ministries. She teaches the teachers of the Oyedow Church.

And she also has a ladies class. And she also writes music. And she puts scripture to the Jarai form of music that they sing. And I hope when they're here next year that they will have some audio of and video of the kids singing. She leads the children's choir and she helps with the young people's choir. And all of our Americans who are in Cambodia help with the pastors school, which is held in the Khmer language.

And any pastor or church leader who speaks Khmer can attend that school. It's been a tremendous success. It's been going on for a number of years. Tim and Ruth say they were here just recently. They visited our home last summer.

And they're up in Sarchel. And no doubt he told you about the church up there and how God has just greatly blessed and supplying the money to be able to purchase this. They now own it. And I had my doubts when they first told me how much they had to raise. And but God supplied. And it's a it's a really it's a really good, solid, thriving church. And this picture on the bottom, I don't know if Tim mentioned this, but you see the faces here. When you think of France, you would think, oh, France, all white people.

No, not by any means. So many of the people in the churches and the churches like they have and the fundamental churches or evangelical churches are made up of people whose heritage is from northern Africa, the Middle East or the Caribbean. It's any place that France has had colonies or they were protectorates under France and they have free access to go to France. And so many of them have gone there as Christians and they meet with fundamental churches like this in Sarchel. And so the Lord has just really greatly blessed their ministry. Marco and good old Nunez started to work down in Cancun, Mexico. And you think of Cancun like this and it is it is the hotel zone is just breathtaking.

It's so beautiful. But this is Cancun. These are the people who service the hotel strip and some of them live very impoverished lives that that wallpaper is cardboard. And they have started a very solid church down there. And besides just the church and pastoring, this is the congregation. They run about one hundred and twenty people. Almost all of these people are Mayan.

Which is amazing. They're that's why they look so short. They are short. They are tribal people. And Marco began teaching the men who wanted to have intense Bible study and training.

Learn how to preach, learn how to do children's ministries and youth ministries, etc. And to get trained and then go back to the town at which they were born. Cancun is a very, very, very new town or city in Mexico. And almost everybody who lives in Cancun, most of the people are people who migrated there from other parts of Mexico. And so all of these men, except Marco with the gray hair and Jeff Davis in the blue shirt, all of these are Mexicans. They're Mayan Mexicans. And all of them went back to the villages and towns that they were born in to establish churches because there was nothing in those areas.

And so God is greatly blessed in that. There's about six other churches besides the one in Cancun. The Sinkovics, these are both Croatian. She went to Bob Jones University. That's where I first met her. She got a master's degree there and went home, married Cornell.

And they came with EMU and they have a thriving work. That's not their church. Croatia is a Catholic country and it's very hard to reach people. If you accept the gospel as we preach it, they say that you are no longer Croatian.

And so it's very much a national thing for them. They have started, well this church was already started by Tanya's brother-in-law and they moved up there to help with that church. Cornell and the brother-in-law, co-pastor, God allowed them to buy, this building here was just a wreck.

And they bought it and fixed it up and it's a gorgeous church now and they've got a very, very solid Baptist church there in northern Croatia. Ted Alston, he teaches nationals in the 1040 window. This goes from everywhere from the Middle East, northern Africa, southeast Asia. He's been to many, many countries and he teaches the nationals in certain areas and the Lord's really blessed that ministry as well. And then the last here is Billy and Saritha. They are both India Indians and they're both from Hyderabad and he was educated here and got his Bible college education in, what's the name of it, Jim?

Shepherds. Shepherds Seminary here in North Carolina and he went back and he's working with his father and they've got a very unique ministry of starting training, they call it college and seminary training in churches that are already established. And their motto is every church a Bible college and he's got a very unique ministry there. Jeff Davis is the current director of EMU.

He has been for about five years now. And then these old people, you really don't know these people because they no longer exist, they're much younger there. And Joan and I have worked in the office for, I've been in the office for 48 years and Joan, a little bit less than that because she had an outside job for a while until the God provided for her to be able to work. And so we're still in the office and our office is actually in our home, has been for 46 years, 48 years and so the Lord is really blessed and that is EMU International. EMU has some other missionaries too, everybody didn't make it into this presentation and because I knew it was going to get too long anyway. You can turn it off if you'd like. I'll just stand here, you can hear me, I don't have to go up there.

I don't want to get a nosebleed going up in the altitude there. Do you all have any questions about anything with EMU? You guys have supported, Joan says this church supports us because they support the home office but you didn't know that so you're really not designated to Ken and Joan Jensen. It helps with the office and there are a lot of expenses there but we thank you very, very much for you've been doing it for a long time. But do you have any questions before you get to go home? There'll be no questions now.

Again we thank you so much for what you do for our missionaries and, yes sir. Would you explain the concept or the terminology, the 1040 window? Yeah, that's the latitude above the equator and it's in the 1040 and so it cuts across North Africa and it goes into the Middle East through those countries. It's basically, when you say 1040 window, it takes in Islam, Islamic countries, almost all the Islamic countries are 1040 windows. Even in the Pacific Ocean, a lot of those are in that area or Buddhist countries and some Hindu. India is Hindu. There are Buddhists there and there are some Islamists there but India is basically Hindu, very much so. Was that a strategy that developed to try and address the disproportion that there were missionaries in so many other places but there was a somewhat neglect in that 1040 window so it's a missionary targeted window?

Yeah, basically that. This is a trend that started, oh I would say 15, 20 years ago is when I started hearing about it and that this was neglected area and one of the reasons it was neglected is because the governments will not let you go in there and so you have to go in with a different occupation. A lot of China is in that too. China is in that. We had a daughter and son-in-law who were in China for almost 20 years. They were there teaching English at Chinese universities, helping with their education.

That's kind of bad, doesn't it? But they were there but they were also able to do Christian ministry, helping with churches, helping teach the Bible in their home and they never had any problem with the government even though the government knew what they were doing because it was just small. It wasn't a huge movement. It wasn't hundreds and hundreds or thousands of people but now the government under the new president who got in, I think it's Xi, isn't it? And he really hates Christianity and he has shut down so much stuff. Even the approved churches he shut down and that's why our daughter and son-in-law came home from Beijing is where they were serving. But Beijing is not actually in the 1040 window but it's the same concept there. Does that answer your question?

Any other questions? I just see the different languages but there's a uniform unity among people throughout the world. I know Christ is so encouraging to see the scripture fulfilled that Christ's word will not return void and every generation to the end will hear the word of God. So be encouraged by this tonight. God will not return void. Yeah, one of the things I didn't bring up in my Sunday school lesson this morning because I ran out of time, as I knew I would, is this whole idea of Gideon and what were his weapons of war at the beginning. It was a trumpet, a vase, and a torch in the vase and then when the vase was broke they held it. They're holding these two things. You can't hold a sword and hold those things. This is one of the worst attack plans ever.

And what happened? Wiped out the Midianites and the Amalekites and the Arabs who were there. And that's what the gospel does. You think, oh man, evangelize? These people don't even want the gospel.

How are you going to do that? With preaching? You know, Muhammad did it with the sword. That's what Islam does. And there are other... Hinduism does it that way.

Buddhists, not so much the sword, but man, they sure pressure. But Christians, we say, what are we fighting with? Well, it's the word of God. It's sort of the word of God. And God made it all. God made all of us, all the people in the world.

He knows how to reach them. And it's a blessing to be a part of seeing that. And we thank the Lord for that, Joan and I do, for being able to have a part in that. I was the director for 30 years and people would say, oh, you're the director. Yeah, like I'm telling people what to do now. I considered myself a traffic director.

If things get clogged up, I need to help unclog the traffic. But basically, our missionaries do what God's called them to do, and we're there to help them do that. And so the missionaries that you guys support, even if you supported all of ours, but the ones you support, I can tell you, we support them too. We love these people. We have confidence in them and they have proven themselves to be faithful in building works. And so thank you.