Dear Friends,

I (Tim) have been back in Brazil for two months now and Marta for three months. We are in a furnished house that belongs to the Presbyterian Mission in Brazil and will remain here until next June. Then we will either return to our former residence just down the street, or move to Florianópolis, a coastal city and state capital about 400 miles south.

Our present call

When we left Brazil and resigned from missionary service in June 1998, I accepted a dual call as director of World Mission Initiative (WMI) at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and eventually director of the New Wilmington Missionary Conference (NWMC). We anticipated remaining in the United States for a number of years. As the year went on, it became increasingly clear to me that my own gifts and call were in the area of teaching, so when the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil requested our services for teaching and the production of missiological materials through the Worldwide Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), we accepted that call. The decision to return to Brazil was easy to make and seemed so clear to us. The decision to leave Pittsburgh, however, was a difficult one, not merely because we had barely begun our ministry there, but also because both organizations had received us so warmly and we believe God is using them in excitingly creative ways for the promotion of the gospel. Pray that God will send the right leadership to WMI and NWMC.

This is the first time Marta and I have worked officially with the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil (IPIB). The IPIB has three seminaries and three mission training centers. I will be assisting the three mission training centers (in Cuiabá, Natal and Florianópolis) and two of the seminaries (in Londrina and Fortaleza) that are offering graduate programs in mission. My main ministry, however, will be to produce programs (missiological courses for church leaders and a reentry course for Brazilian missionaries) and materials (books and articles). Along the way, other roles have begun to emerge such as serving as a liaison between Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship and the IPIB Mission Board. Pray for direction to prioritize Tim’s roles and functions with the IPIB.

Marta is also being asked to serve in ministry to the IPIB. In previous years, her assignment has been officially to the home, although she always spent substantial time in ministry, including teaching (linguistics and language acquisition for missionaries), translation, and editing. Now that the kids are older she can give more time to ministry so her specific role is currently being worked out between the IPIB and the Worldwide Ministries Division. It could involve assisting a nationwide program among Protestant churches to identify and plant churches among the unreached peoples and segments of Brazil. More about that later as the role materializes. Pray that God would give direction to IPIB and PCUSA church leaders for defining further Marta’s ministry.

Recent ministry

The last few days of August Tim spent a few days on the Rio Negro near Manaus in the Amazon Region with IPIB mission leaders, Dan McNerney, and a group from Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, and Larry Kraft of O.C. Ministries. The purpose of the trip was to identify some of the unreached peoples of the Amazon as possible areas of IPIB church planting. It was an exciting experience. We ate and slept (in hammocks) on a riverboat as we traveled for two days up the river. The first community we visited was Guedes (close to where the movie "Anaconda" was filmed!) with about 300 inhabitants, a few of them Christians through the ministry of a young doctor, the daughter of a local pastor, who visits every month. When we were there she had treated 24 patients, 20 of whom had malaria. Our time there was short, just an hour or so, and we were on our way. Pray that God will raise up local leadership to evangelize and disciple and that the Holy Spirit will bring spiritual and physical healing to this village.

Later we visited Araras, where the community leader made it clear that Christians were not welcome. With quite a bit of tact and God’s grace we were able to converse with this man and his sick wife (she had a withered leg) and before we left, I asked permission for the group to pray for him, which he allowed us to do. Later we visited some of the families and learned why Christians were not welcome: prostitution and a hallucinogenic herb were the means of sustenance for the community. Pray that the spiritual and economic binds of oppression be broken there.

We visited other communities as well, one Indian community—almost entirely members of the Church of God—and another with a rustic Presbyterian Church. There are over 40,000 such villages in the Amazon region of Brazil. At the most only 5,000 have any kind of church at all. Pray that God will prick the ears of Brazilian Christians to reach out to the scattered communities of this region. And pray for the research efforts to visit each village in order to develop descriptions to be publicized to the church of Brazil, under the leadership of Larry Kraft and O.C. Ministries.

Family

Tim Jr. (17) and Sarah (13) are back in their former school (the American School of Campinas), renewing old friendships and establishing new ones there and at church. They are adapting well socially (as expected) but having to buckle down under the discipline of school life. Pray especially for Tim Jr. as he is in his senior year and has all those difficult decisions to make concerning college and his life’s profession, with little clear clues as to what he would like to do.

Jenny (19) joined us about a month ago, after her first few weeks of her second year of college at UNC-Charlotte. She was diagnosed last June with acute ulcerative colitis and has been undergoing treatment ever since. But this is a difficult illness to treat and involves stress, diet, and hereditary factors. She felt she was not making progress in her treatment by late August so we all agreed that she should join us here. Please pray for her healing and the decisions she will have to make eventually to continue her studies (fine arts: illustration) either in the United States or here in Brazil (she will be taking the Brazilian college entrance exams later this year).

Thanks so much for your prayers.

Yours in Christ,

Tim & Marta Carriker