More than 40 days in the wilderness

JERSEY SHORE, Pa. - Seven young adults gather for Sunday worship in a crude, two-room house fashioned from plastic sheeting and lumber that they cut themselves. Clad in shorts and jeans and clutching well-thumbed Bibles, they join in song to guitar accompaniment.

The melody drifts across the makeshift encampment where 28 students have spent two weeks, the final exercise in a training program for their exotic vocation. This is the Missions Institute of New Tribes Mission, a yearlong boot camp that’s more rigorous than the usual orientation programs for foreign missionaries, and for good reason.

New Tribes specializes in evangelism among the 3,000 indigenous groups in the world’s remotest tracts — places that remain isolated from the outside world and untouched by Christianity. Most operations are in Latin America, Southeast Asia and West Africa.

Teams of five or six missionaries leave the modern world and its conveniences behind to spend years living among tribespeople, learning their language and culture to translate the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament into languages that, for the most part, have never been written. The missionaries then teach reading and writing, and establish churches to be run by their converts.

Groups can spend 10 or 20 years, or even longer, in the same location.

‘Marines of the church’

“We’re way out there. We’re like the Marines of the church,” said Greg Sanford, the director of the Pennsylvania institute. New Tribes also has campuses in Durant, Miss., and Baker City, Ore.

Despite the rigors and accusations of cultural imperialism, New Tribes, based in Sanford, Fla., has assembled one of the largest missionary forces in the world — 3,200 workers in 17 countries, two-thirds of them Americans.

The group is similar to the even-larger Wycliffe Bible Translators, based in nearby Orlando, Fla., and the two agencies often cooperate in the field. Both are evangelical Protestant, and employ techniques pioneered by the late University of Michigan anthropologist Kenneth L. Pike to render oral languages into written form.

Those who enlist aren’t lured by the money. The mission’s recommended pay for a couple without children is $4,000 a month, before deductions for all benefits and business expenses. Candidates must raise that on their own through pledges from supporters. Some 20,000 U.S. congregations and thousands of individuals contributed $41 million last year, providing most of the group’s revenue.

Dangers, hardships

The work can be dangerous.

During New Tribes’ 62 years of operation, 87 missionaries have died in the line of duty, most of them in plane crashes during the early years.

The mission’s very first foray in 1943 ended disastrously when fearful Bolivian tribesmen killed all five visiting missionaries, though contact was later re-established and today one-third of these people are Christians.

Twenty-two missionaries have been kidnapped, and six of them were killed. The most recent victim was Martin Burnham, shot to death in 2002 during an attempt to free him from Muslim kidnappers in the Philippines; his wife, Gracia, was wounded. New Tribes recently intensified training in security measures and how to act if taken hostage.

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