Amazon Jungle Gospel Advance

Sharing the gospel effectively among the people here involves telling them the stories of Scripture.

Click here to see how your gifts accomplish this task!

Thank you for your faithful intercession and sacrificial giving on behalf of our team and the indigenous people of the Amazon whom God calls us to reach. With your support, we are sending missionaries to travel into the Amazon with national partners on an arduous journey to find remote villages and share the gospel. Whether they travel by motorboat, prop plane, or canoe, your partnership enables us to establish relationships, identify the language, and learn the culture of these isolated peoples to communicate the gospel of Christ effectively.

Opportunities Abound. Through your generosity, missionaries are training and equipping local leaders to share the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches. Amazon people are oral learners, meaning they prefer hearing information instead of reading, but most Bible training and seminaries are in literate formats. As a result, we have developed trainings specifically for oral learners.

Orality Transforms Evangelism. In one of the more recent orality trainings, 15 local indigenous people—some of the only believers among their people—took part in the training. They learned how to internalize and share stories from God’s Word so they can evangelize and disciple others. Seeing these participants learn so quickly using a format they understood was powerful. They were excited about this oral method and anxious to take the gospel to their people. One of the participants said, “It is time for us to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to our parentes (relatives) who have not heard the gospel yet!” Along with us and our IMB colleagues, many of you have prayed for years to hear a local believer say those words!

Here are ways you can pray for gospel carriers:

• Pray for these 15 believers to continue to grow strong in their faith and obedience to Christ.
• Pray for them as they prepare to take the gospel to their people who have not heard.
• Pray for boldness and wisdom as they deal with anthropologists, government workers, and other locals who create barriers against the gospel.

Your sacrificial gifts and intercession are truly transforming lives as we partner together to solve the world’s greatest problem, lostness.

Thank you for investing in taking the gospel to the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon! One of the missionaries you support through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering recently shared about working with local believers to develop stories of God’s Word into indigenous languages so they may hear about the God who loves them!

“As I sit in front of my computer to transcribe a recorded translation of the Creation story and anchor it to Scripture, I think about the person who sent the cell phone recording and the hours of preparation and training that led up to this point. The message was sent from an indigenous believer living in a small river community about 200 miles from my house. Getting there requires a regional flight and a six-hour boat trip. The last time I was in his village, I went with him to visit neighbors’ houses to test the Bible stories. I watched him work with others to determine which local words and phrases worked best and listened to encouraging words from church members as they heard him tell the Bible stories in their language.

I wondered why he continually works so hard on the stories and recordings. It’s because he knows that there are people groups in the jungle around him who have never heard the gospel. He knows that his language is the most similar to those spoken by those groups. So, he presses ahead in the Storying Project. He sacrifices time from his job and joins me in the work. He is one of 30 such indigenous believers from four people groups that partner with me. I am so thankful for the indigenous brothers and sisters who have joined me to develop oral Scripture resources for making disciples among the peoples of the Amazon Basin. I push play and keep typing to start the next step of the process. The unreached of the Amazon are waiting!

Prayer Requests

• Please pray that these stories from God’s Word will be sown in the Amazon and bring forth a harvest in God’s kingdom.
• Pray that the Indigenous workers have the strength and health to prepare the stories and that they will be faithful to God’s Word.
• Pray for those who have not yet heard the good news so that when these evangelistic stories arrive, they will fall on good soil that will bring forth a harvest!