Flying, speaking & sharing the Gospel
25 June 2024
JOSH SNADER
| Samaritan Aviation
WEWAK - We here at Samaritan Aviation fly people to hospital on our float planes but that's just half of what we do.
Communicating the Gospel to our patients and Papua New Guinea is our ultimate priority. How do we do that?
The first thing to know is that PNG has more than 800 active languages.
As my English teacher in high school would often remind me, I have yet to master my mother tongue, let alone learn 799 others!
The people of PNG, although they learn several languages from childhood, can’t learn them all.
This is why Tok Pisin, a basic trade language, used by an estimated 5 to 6 million people, is a national language.
The second thing to know is that people here have traditionally been oral communicators.
Many languages didn’t have a written alphabet until a few decades ago. Some still don’t.
As time progresses more children are going to school and learning to read and write.
However, many of our patients are from remote areas of the Sepik Province where there are no schools.
Oral communication is key.
So, if we want to present the Gospel to a broad audience, we do it best by using Tok Pisin to verbally communicate.
Our national workers Robert, Catherine, Betty and Minape visit our patients every day.
Everyone from our staff and their families visit them weekly.
These hospital visits are effective, but how do we continue to communicate with patients and their families, and even their villages, after they leave the hospital?
How can we communicate when we are no longer with the patient?
One way that we do this is by using audio Bibles. These Bibles are solar powered, sturdy, simple to use and feature the entire Bible recorded in Tok Pisin.
You can listen with headphones or with a built-in speaker.
It isn’t unusual to visit the hospital and see a group of people gathered around our patient listening to an audio Bible.
The audio Bible then travels back with patients to their village, thus spreading the Gospel even after we’ve said our goodbyes.
I have good memories of my time in Papua New Guinea as a Catholic missionary when I was in cooperation with the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) mission.
There was rivalry as well, but I remember the cooperation.
Initially I was based at Togoba in Western Highlands Province. Nearby was a leprosarium run by the SDA.
I was made welcome there to celebrate mass with those leprosy patients who were Catholic.
Some of the medical staff from there also provided occasional assistance to the leprosarium at Yampu in Enga Province, which was run by Catholic sisters.
If I remember correctly there was a Dr Robson in Togoba in early 1970’s.
Later on in Mt Hagen, I had good experiences of cooperation with the SDA mission with regard to Bible translation.
With the direction and experience of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the various mission and church groups in the Hagen area got together to work on a new translation of the Bible into the Melpa language.
Lutherans, SDA, local Church, Catholics and others all worked together on translation.
In today's world there is an ongoing need for the various churches, and indeed likewise an ongoing need for the various religions, to work together for the good of all humanity and the natural world.
Posted by: Garrett Roche | 29 June 2024 at 09:16 PM