Kingdom Pursuits where you hear from ordinary people instilled with an extraordinary passion. Together we explore the stories of men and women who take what they love and let God turn their passion into Kingdom Pursuits. Now live from the Truth Booth, your host, Robbie Dilmore. It's like I've hosted Kingdom Pursuits already. Those of you who listen to Christian Kargai's show, we had a lady, her passion was to get up and fix her men breakfast before they went out in the fields on a farm in Ohio.
It was absolutely beautiful. And another man who's out there taking people to hospital, their doctor's appointments early in the morning, and another man, you know, just such a diverse world we live in. And today I am so excited on Kingdom Pursuits to have somebody I've wanted to talk to him for weeks, but I've always wanted to talk to a missionary to Indonesia.
Because like many of you, you may have read the book Peace Child, and it's such a fascinating thing about what God is doing around the world through both Bible translation and so many other things. I have Roger Dorio. And Roger, welcome to Kingdom Pursuits. Hey, thank you, Robbie.
I'm really excited to be on here. And so, Roger, where do you live now? I live, Suzanne and I, my wife and I, have moved back on to the farm, 100-acre farm in northwest Ohio, in Ohio, where I grew up. And after our many years in Indonesia, we are now back here on the farm as our base.
We're not retired. We still make trips back to Indonesia and follow up a lot by the internet and so forth, but are also involved in ministries here now. So how did you originally feel called to Indonesia? Well, it was kind of a process.
It's interesting. My wife, Suzanne, heard a missionary speaker when she was like six or seven years old and really felt the Lord calling her to be a missionary nurse and use medical means to help people with their spiritual needs as well. In my case, I grew up in a Christian home on a farm here and attended an evangelical church from the time I was small and heard the gospel. And I actually was saved, received Christ as my personal Savior when I was 10 years old at a Bible camp in southern Ohio. And then a couple of years later, I had a speaker emphasize Romans 12, 1 and 2 about giving your body, giving yourself to the Lord as a living sacrifice. And I made that commitment at that time and told the Lord I was willing to do whatever he wanted me to do, to go wherever he wanted me to go all of my lifetime. But then I went after I finished school, high school, I went to college, I went to Bible college one year, didn't feel the Lord leading me into anything particular at that time, then studied civil engineering, became a civil engineer, worked in West Virginia several years with the State World Commission on a highway department, the interstate highway program.
And then at that point, after visiting a missionary down in Venezuela, I began to feel that God wanted me to go back to theological school, which I did, quit my job, gave up that salary, went back to school, heard about the great need for Bible translation, and ended up at Dallas Theological Seminary, met my wife Suzanne there, and together the Lord led us to Papua Indonesia, the western half of the island of New Guinea to do Bible translation, church planting, and so forth. Wow, it's such a story. It's such a story, which isn't that pretty much where Peace Child, that book that was written, wasn't that that same area? Yes, that's West New Guinea. It was called Irian Jaya. It's pretty famous in missions for being called Irian Jaya. There was this book written from Jerusalem to Irian Jaya with good biographical information about people from the early days of the church to the present time. It's been called, it was Dutch New Guinea actually, Netherlands New Guinea after the war, and then it was called Irian or West Irian, Irian Jaya, and now it's called Papua, and people confuse it many times with Papua New Guinea, which is an independent country on the eastern half of the big island of New Guinea.
This is the western half, and it's part of the nation of Indonesia. Yeah, that's beautiful, absolutely, and that idea of Bible translation, so you can see how exciting all that's going to be, but, you know, since it's Kingdom Pursuits, we've got to play a little shenanigans, so speaking of peace. Oh, yes it is. Oh, you're going to be great, and we have Nick and Randall both in the wings to see what they can do with this, so if you could picture in your mind, Nick, or again Roger or Randy, you know, boiling water is headstone, so here's a headstone for boiling water, besides rest in peace, what else would it say? Boiling water. Boiling water? Yeah, what do you think, Randy?
Randy's looking, he's studying, it looks like he's gone Google or something, trying to find it. Rest in precipitation? No, you will be missed. How about this one? What three words lead to inner peace? What three words lead to inner peace?
And you probably can come up with some great ones, but, you know, these, when I tell you, you're going to go, oh yeah, that probably works. Inner peace. Three words. Let it go. That's good, I like that one. Trust in God.
Yeah, that's better, that's way better, but the one I have is not my problem. That's so true. I don't know if that's going to give me a long range inner peace.
I was so tempted to say not my circus. Alright, so what do most people love about the book War and Peace? What do most people love about the book War and Peace? I'm going to be so honest, Robbie, I haven't read that book. I read that book, but it was a half a century ago, so I don't really know. Yeah, me too. Most people that read it recently, they'll tell you, well, it's a long story. Well, I was drinking something along that line, but you know I'm not going to express it. In my understanding, it's over a thousand pages.
Randy, you read it, you are one up on me. No, it's a beast. So why is India, here you go, this isn't New Guinea by any means, because they're at war quite often, but why is India rarely at war? You never hear about a lot of wars that India was involved in.
Why is that? Hindus are peaceful. Yeah, they're very peaceful.
Plus, no beef. Oh, and you knew at the end of that I would actually have a Bible riddle for you to call in and win today, and so with that in mind, here goes. So if you can call in with this one, you can win today, and just tell us who left his peace with you in the Bible. Who left his peace with you in the Bible?
866-348-7884, 866-34-TRUTH. And if you can answer who left their peace with you in the Bible, Nick, tell them what they'll win. Oh, yes. Today you'll be winning a prize from the Kenyan Pursuits prize vault. There's so many things.
It's overflowing with so many prizes that you can win if you answer right. Oh, we've got t-shirts. We've got books.
We have the legendary Gospel back scratcher. So 866-348-7884, who left his peace with you in the Bible? We would love to know your answer to that, 866-348-7884. And so, you know, when I read Peace Child, those people were cannibals, right? Well, that's right.
When we went into West New Guinea in 1975 into the Nalta tribal area, about a thousand square mile area, there was still some cannibalism taking place at that time. Oh, my goodness. Well, we've got to go to a break, Roger.
In the meantime, you can load up and call 866-348-7884. We would love to hear who you think left his peace with you in the Bible. And when we come back, we've got a lot more missionary Bible translation to New Guinea.
You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. Welcome back to Kingdom Pursuits, where we hear how God takes your passion and uses it to build the kingdom. And we're so blessed we really are today to have Roger Doreo with us. He's a missionary and Bible translator to Indonesia. And, wow, still doing it, but, you know, just making occasional trips, but it was full-time there.
So I'm so excited to get to that. But first we got Kirk has got to answer in Raleigh, North Carolina, to who left his peace with you, Kirk, in the Bible. Hey, good morning, Robbie.
Good morning. I think it's the 14th chapter of John says Jesus left us his peace. Yeah, you're exactly right, right? Isn't that an amazing thing? That is wonderful.
Right, it's his. And I couldn't be more delighted that you called in today. And so you're listening on what station?
I think it's 105.7. Oh, wonderful. It's the truth station out of Winston. Right, it's – let's see, Raleigh is W – oh, it's right behind me.
I love that. I have a big banner behind me, Roger. I mean, Kirk, and if I just look at it, but there's a tree covering up Raleigh, which it's actually – I think I was trying to get the call letters, but they're not on there, but I appreciate you listening. I know WCRU is – it's WTRU in the triad, and it's WCRU in Charlotte, and I'm thinking – I don't know why it escaped me.
W – what do you say – go ahead, Nick. I believe it's DRU. You're right. It's WDRU, right?
Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill. You're exactly right. Good job, Kirk. Thank you. I'm sorry. My mind went out to lunch. God bless. We'll get you out your prize. I'm looking forward to that. So getting back to Roger. Roger, so you get into New Guinea, and obviously – or maybe not obviously, but from what I read in Peace Child, it just – it's more than amazing how the Bible would appeal to people that really their language probably wasn't even a written language, was it?
You're correct on that. There are actually about 275 different languages distinct enough that they need separate translation in the western half of the island of New Guinea. And we – when we went into the Nalta tribe and we go in by small single-engine plane, actually to this day there are no roads going into this area, no regular electricity, but we fly in with MAF or some other services, land on a grass airstrip, and that's how we get in and out of there. But there – no one in this tribe and many, many other tribes there in all of New Guinea actually knew how to read or write. So when our colleagues – there were some colleagues that went in a little earlier than we did, but they – and we finished up figuring out our orthography and alphabet that corresponds to the sounds that the people made there. And then we taught literacy, we teach the people how to write the different sounds that they make, teach people how to read and write, and then in translating the Bible they can begin to read the Bible for themselves.
And so what a fascinating study, like, because, you know, the Bible – language is extremely important, and obviously in the book of Acts we're all going to end up, you know, speaking in a language similar to what the Holy Spirit brought us. But I'm curious, like, when you created their alphabet, what kind of sounds did they make and what did that alphabet look like? Well, actually, you may or may not know that throughout the world there are over 7,000 different languages, and there are different amounts of letters in different languages. Some languages use – I mean, there's an international phonetic alphabet which has all the different kinds of sounds that people make in the world. Well, every language has certain ones that they use. We have 26 letters in our alphabet. There are languages with maybe – I forget exactly – 10 or 12 different letters is all they really have. There are others that have many, many more than 26, and then you have, like, Chinese and Korean, some of these that use the symbols and everything. In the Nalta language, they pretty much make the same sounds that we make in Indonesian as well, but like in Nalta, they don't have – in Indonesian, they don't use X. They use K-S, like taxi. We spell it T-A-X-I. They would write it T-A-K-S-I, taxi.
Cool. Well, we probably say it more like that when you think about it, depending on what part of the country you're in. So you go in there and – so what was it like actually trying to befriend these people to even get to this point? Okay, well, that really happened more so with the very first missionaries who went in there. In 1964, there were a couple of missionaries that trekked in from the nearest airstrip at that time, which was about five days' walk through the jungle to get into the main part of the Nalta area. And when they went in there and they could not communicate at all, they had nationals from another tribe, the Doni tribe, with them. So they were people that looked just pretty much like the people in the Nalta area, but they didn't know their language at all, just completely different.
So they had to use sign language and everything else, and the people were pretty afraid, fearful, and they wouldn't see many kids or women as they would approach villages and so forth. They would hide. Some of these people had seen some of these white people when they surveyed the area and they used planes and they circled around, tried to find where they might put an airstrip and what the population looked like there. And they were close enough to the ground they could actually see there were people in there. And they actually somehow probably thought these people, their skin is different and they may be gods who have come down.
We saw them in the planes. But anyhow, eventually they saw that they were friendly. The missionaries gave them salt and different things, and the people eventually, in the main area where they ended up, they had a little ceremony and they used pig grease and they greased them all over to kind of initiate them into their tribe and accept them as people that could stay there.
Wow. And so that work had been done, and so as they begin to talk with you and they develop some sign language, did they have a language that you could communicate with them by the time you got there? Okay, by the time we got there, the early missionaries had done a lot of this difficult work, which was initially you kind of just point to things and they say something, you point to a tree and they say gal and you write it down. G-A-L, gal, you point to a rock and they say giddik and you write that down and you start getting a list of words and then in the evening you surround in their huts, they had in each village they had like a larger hut for the clan, the whole clan, or there may be several of them if there's several clans in a larger village. And this is primarily where the men gathered and then each man who was married will also have a smaller hut, a family hut for him and his wife and kids and their pigs.
That's another story. But anyhow, then as you sit and listen to people and you have different words that you know and then you hear them say something in context and you jot that down quickly. They say nunda dil bini mop and you know well bini mop is something about going and dil, I've heard that kind of with eating and oh well they're going over there to eat so nunda dil bini mop probably means we are going to eat. And then you just experiment with that, you get different senses and concepts and you can actually decipher a language without knowing anything at all and having no books to study regarding that particular language. Right, it's just using critical thinking and putting it together piece by piece. And then when it comes to the actual Bible translation, so you build this alphabet, you build a vocabulary and you start the process of teaching them that. But now, if you just try to sit down and copy a Bible, it's an unbelievable job to begin to translate the Bible and so that was something that you learned in Dallas Theological Seminary.
What was that like? Well, also we studied with the summary through the linguistics, SIL and Wycliffe, we studied linguistic principles, how to decipher language and a lot of stuff like this. At Dallas, I primarily got original languages, Greek and Hebrew and a lot of my Bible background. So yeah, let's see. So what was your main question again? So now you've developed this alphabet and you've developed a vocabulary, now you're going to actually start to, so you're going to sit there and go, okay, Genesis 1-1, in the beginning. But apparently we've got to go to a break before we get down to the... Okay, what's going on after that?
Yeah, when we get back, we'll do that and, you know, so fun. Roger Doreo. And so Roger, if people want to reach out, find out more about your ministry, where can they go? Well, we use Facebook a lot. We have lots of pictures, information, videos and so forth. My main Facebook page is Roger Doreo.
Welcome back to Kingdom Pursuits, where we hear how God takes your passion and uses it to build the kingdom. And we're so blessed to have with us today, Roger Doreo, which, as Roger was talking right before we went to the break, to get up with Roger, he suggests you go to his Facebook page. Or it's not a page, it's just his, you know, his friend page or whatever you want to call it, just to be his friend on Facebook.
Yeah, we put in posts, there are pictures, videos, all kinds of stuff we put on. But in order to get to that, you've got to know how to spell Doreo, which is going to sound a little strange, but it's French. So it's D-O-R-I-O-T.
There's a T on the end, which happens to be silent. So the way you say it, you know, you just think about the Wizard of Oz. And when they were, you know, there, do you remember this, Randy, when they were circling the witch's house and they were trying to get in there, they were going Doreo. Oh, you remember that? But anyway, it's Doreo and D-O-R-I-O-T. Roger, he's got 4.9 thousand friends and now he's got 4.9 thousand and one. So I just set up a friend request.
But anyway, Roger Doreo with a T at Facebook, if you want to follow him, which what a fascinating story. So again, now you've got the language, begin to get the alphabet, you've begun to understand the words, you've got a vocabulary. Now comes this like, man, how do you take that and are you actually responsible to saying, OK, this word means beginning, this word means in, this means God.
OK, let me explain to you simply how we did. So after you get a word list and you start to pick up a lot of different words and understand what they say and you could point to things and then what concepts you have to, they're a little more difficult, you have to kind of observe things and so forth. But anyhow, after you have words and you start to put things together and you can understand somewhat the grammar, they actually, we say the boy hit the ball, but they put the verb at the end of the sentence.
They say the boy, the ball hit. And so you learn all that stuff. And then when you first do translation, I got two or three other guys that were pretty sharp and were interested and we'd sit down and we'd begin to do translation.
I'll just simplify this. So when, say, John 3 16, John 3 16, the first part of it, they say evening out of sober long arc, one of the rules of Gaza. So from what I knew, I would begin to translate that. And I learned that God was a make me you make is up in the sky and his father, the father up in the sky, even nail and people, non name or non is people and so what is earth or ground or something like that the people of the earth.
And then love and, and so forth. So, so I would read this to these guys and say, Okay, now how is this good. I mean, I'm pretty new in the language here.
Okay, what of this is good. What can you understand what exactly how do you understand that. And they would say okay well this first part there that's pretty clear that's the you know say God loves people but this last part or what did you, what do you mean by this is a very clear. And so then you would explain a little further and then they say oh if that's the way, if that's what you're trying to say you say like this. So we change it and put down their words so we just go back and forth and revise the initial translation that I tried to do there until we get something that they can understand and they say this has the meaning that you're trying to communicate. That's basically a way we began doing translation. Beyond cool that is Roger I gotta tell you I just learned a whole lot right there but I got I'm really curious about something else so you're sitting down with these, these, these wonderful folks and, and they're learning God's word. Have they ever like pointed something out to you like, Oh, I've never saw that before that's there, like they they God gives them something from what you gave them and then they taught you with it. Oh yes, that's definitely.
So, and actually in a lot of cases. When the missionaries like us began to do translation work. There were no Christians. These tribes of course they never heard the Bible they heard the gospel never heard about God that created the earth and as the missionary began to learn the language and then begin to do translation. Many times these informants, which we call them were actually the first believers, because they heard these things and the Holy Spirit worked in their lives. Then they accepted that and said, wow, you know, this is amazing what God has done.
And then further as you're indicating the last part of that. As, as we have been there some years and when I would go out into other villages where evangelists had gone and people were beginning to receive the gospel maybe they even have a baptism, but I go and, and I listened to some of these, these national evangelists that we had worked with and train and give us some simple messages and translate some scripture verses and so forth. Some of these guys would preach and I would listen. And there were times when I'd say, wow, that's good. I mean, I could never express it like that.
So, they understood the concepts and they received the Lord and the Holy Spirit worked and guided them, they could do better than we could do in in teaching and preaching the people. And that beautiful. That is just like, how cool was that? And you guys got to sit with that process growing and growing and getting to know those kind of individuals. What other stories stick out to you of things that you witnessed that you were just like, man, God, I did not see this one coming? Oh boy, there are a lot of things.
Well, let me just say one thing. I mentioned that there was still cannibalism in this area when we went in, in some of the villages. And also there was a lot of inner village fighting. There was no government presence, so there were no police, no soldiers, or anything here, so they had to settle things among themselves. And if somebody would maybe steal somebody's wife or something like that, and then this other village, they get up in arms and they bring their bows and arrows.
They fought with bows and arrows, a lot of things similar to the Indians in our country. And so they start fighting and they shoot arrows at each other and they kill people sometimes. And until they decided to settle it or the one side said, OK, we killed somebody and that makes up for stealing his wife.
And so this is fine. And they they stopped fighting. But there was a lot of fighting like this. But anyhow, after a story about Odia, who was the chief of one of the tribes there, just the east of our main station across the Nalta River, from which the name of the Nalta tribe comes. We had at this time began to send village evangelists out in the different villages. And there was one village out a couple days walk that we had heard of, but we had never I had never been there. And we had a couple guys from our local village there that came back one day and said, we just been out to the cargo village. And I said, oh, so we haven't really taken the gospel out there.
What can we do? I said, well, you know, we'll arrange for the helicopter. And because it's a long walk up there, two days walk will arrange for the mission helicopter. You guys go out there again the next trip, you go in a few weeks or so, go out there again and clear a place for the helicopter land and we'll take a couple evangelists out there. OK, well, this all proceeded and the helicopter was kind of late getting there because of rain that particular morning.
But Odia, who was the chief of the tribe, he was an evangelist, too. He had received the Lord. And so we went out with the helicopter and we circled around in this area and we couldn't see where there was a helicopter pad or a nice clearing. And then the pilot said, oh, wait, down there, it looks like there's done some work.
And so we circled down and it didn't look too good. He said, well, he said, I can land here, but I'll keep the I'll keep the. Roger, we got to go to a break. So we're going to find out what happened when this helicopter landed. And it sounds exciting when we come back with Roger Dorio.
It's D-O-R-I-O-T on Facebook. So how fun missionary to Indonesia. You're listening to the Truth Network and Truth Network dot com. Welcome back to Kingdom Pursuits, where we hear how God takes your passion and uses it to build the kingdom. And what a blessing it's been today to have Roger Dorio with us. He's a missionary and Bible translator to Indonesia. And we've been hearing these amazing stories again. His last name is D-O-R-I-O-T.
If you want to friend him on Facebook, support their ministry, that kind of thing. So when we left our hero, the tribe leader, et cetera, they were trying to land this helicopter down in the cannibal territory, I guess, right? That's right. And so the pilot put the helicopter down gingerly and he says, not very stable here, but I'll keep the motor running. And a little bit, a couple of guys came out of the jungle and approached the clearing.
But they were they weren't the two guys that had gone out there to be the the helicopter pad. And so I started to get out and Odia said, wait, don't get out. He said they killed him. And I said, I shut the door and said, what do you mean? He said that one guy is wearing a give me his hat and that other guy has the ax that the other guy had. He said they killed him. Let's get out of here. And well, I said, well, just let's think about this.
We're safe in the helicopter and it costs a lot of money to come out here. And so we opened the door to talk to the guys and said, what happened? Where's give me it? Where's the two guys that came out here? They said, oh, they left off and went over the trail to go back home. And we thought, why in the world would they leave when we're coming here to pick them up in the helicopter and to leave these other evangelists off?
So anyhow, we finally got out and we they said the village is over here in the trees and we started walking along the path. And Odia looked over the grass and he saw this arrowhead. He picked it up and had blood on it. And he said, what's this? And they said, oh, we killed a pig last night. I had a little feast here, but we didn't know. Anyway, we went to the village and we couldn't tell if these people had actually killed these two people that came out ahead of time. Or if they were peaceful or what. And I said to Odia and the other guy, I said, OK, we were planning on leaving you here, you know, to share the gospel with these people. But we don't know if it's safe. They killed them or not. And you might not be safe.
You could just we can all go back in the helicopter. And Odia thought for a minute. And then he said, he said, well, we've come out of here to give them the gospel. They need the gospel. He said, we'll stay here. We'll try to share the gospel with them. If they kill us, they'll kill us.
But we'll trust in the Lord. And I didn't know whether to take that answer or not. But finally, we decided to let them go and we prayed and we left, went back on the helicopter.
And a few days later, the other two guys showed up and said, oh, yeah, helicopter was late. And, you know. But anyhow, the fact that Odia was willing, I mean, there was real danger there.
Yeah, when you picked up that arrowhead with the blood on it, it's like, whoop, whoop. Oh, my word. Now there are Christians in that village. Really?
Really? Well, it's pretty obvious that Satan did not want that. And he had some. But that's amazing that when they had their hats on and whatever, that he was he was seeing that.
Did you get an explanation of that? They given them those gifts or what? Well, they actually had killed the pig the night before and had a little feast there and everything. And the two guys had just shared a little bit with them. But then then they went back home. And, yeah, it turned out fine.
A lot of people were praying. I can imagine. Oh, wow. What a story. Robbie, let me just mention one thing.
I just appreciate so much on the Kingdom Pursuits Web page. And as you start to program with this thing about ordinary people instilled with an extraordinary passion. I mean, these are listeners today.
There's probably I doubt if there's any Hollywood movie stars or presidents or vice presidents are listening. A lot of ordinary people. But we desperately need more ordinary people just to do what the scriptures tell us to do. The great commission to pray and to give and so forth. And God will do some extraordinary things. I think of Second Corinthians 12 9, you know, where he says his strength or his power is made perfect through weakness. It's showing to others God's power, even when we're weak, when we're ordinary people.
And First Corinthians 126 says not many wise, not many influential and so forth. God uses ordinary people. And I hope our listeners will realize that there are so many people without the gospel, without God's word around the world. We need people that are willing just to get information, hear information and pray. God will use ordinary people to do a lot of extraordinary things.
That's absolutely beautiful. I was actually looking this morning at Moses and thinking about how here was a man, slow of speech, slow of tongue, yet turned out to be one of the greatest and possibly, you know, of the Old Testament, one of the greatest teachers, one of the greatest communicators. But God anointed the message. And that's how that works.
He doesn't call the equipped, he equips the called kind of thing. And it's a beautiful thing. Kingdom pursuits. Well, Roger, you are amazing. A man of God that God has instilled with you such amazing stuff and stories. Keep up the great work, my friend.
Again, it's Roger, D-O-R-I-O-T on Facebook. If you want to get involved, pray, et cetera. Thank you so much for being with us today. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. And now stay tuned. You got so much truth coming at you, encouraging prayer with James Banks, followed by Mike Zwick, if not for God, in a lot of stations. Thank you for listening.
