We Joined a Tribal Team!

The new Guarijío missionary team!

We write with exciting news!! After many years of preparation and training, almost two years of Spanish and cultural study and lots of prayer and conversation, we have chosen with whom we will live and work for the foreseeable future! After so many years of anticipation, it is extremely exciting to have this settled and to begin making plans for the future. We’d love to tell you about the Guarijío people and the amazing couple we will be partnering with!
The Guarijío people are spread out in different small towns/villages. There are two dialects of their language (different enough that they need two Bible translations), and where we will be, among the Guarijío Alto, there are between 750-1,000 people. This people group has had missionaries working with them already and there is a small church there (10-15 believers) that needs discipleship to be rooted deeper so that it will continue to function without missionaries there. It’s exciting to be able to step in at this phase of the work when there has already been very much tilling and plowing done by faithful missionaries who have gone before us to make the soil ready for planting.
We are very excited about who our partners will be. We will be working with a family who met and got married in Mexico’s missionary training program (where we live right now). The husband Vicente is from the Guarijío people group. His home village is actually the same village we are moving into. After he got saved and learned Spanish he attended New Tribes Bible Institute and the missionary training here in Mexico. It will be such a huge blessing and advantage to have someone on our missionary team with his cultural insight. And he speaks the language perfectly. His wife, Erendira, is from the Cora people group from a little further south in Mexico. They are both very good friends of ours and we are very much looking forward to partnering with them in what God is doing among the Guarijío. We are honored to have such amazing coworkers who we genuinely respect and admire for who they are now and what they have been through to be able to bring the gospel back to their own people.

On the left is our co-workers house, middle is our new house and right is the Church

Now that we’ve formed a team you might be wondering about our timeline. Some of you may have heard that Don was able to test out of official Spanish study at the beginning of June. It was a huge accomplishment and a relief to be done! He has been serving as temporary IT help and taking care of the guest house we have here in the city during the summer as well. He has actually been very busy with those things and a few other odd jobs he has been handed at times. Chrissy is getting pretty close to reaching the level in Spanish where she can test out. We're hoping Chrissy can test out in May and if not she'll test again in August. There is already a house for us to move into that belonged to the missionaries who were there on the team before us. I know, I know, there are a lot of people who were hoping to be able to come out and build our home! Don’t worry, if that was you, we will still be planning some work trips in the future because there are several projects for the people that we hope to get done!

So what will we do once we get into the village? Like we mentioned, there are some believers, but the church needs help being established. They haven’t been meeting without any missionaries there. One of our biggest priorities will be discipling potential leaders in the church who will someday become the pastors and elders who can lead the church without missionaries living there. After finishing the taxing job of learning Spanish, we will be jumping right back into language study to learn the Guarijío language. Our desire is to be able to communicate clearly and in a way that they will understand best. Now that we speak Spanish, we know better than ever how much better a person's ‘heart language’ speaks to them. We can understand all that is being said in the sermons we attend in Spanish on Sundays, but still find that our hearts respond so much better to the language we were raised with. Many of the Guarijío people will speak varying levels of Spanish, and so it is possible we will be able to do some teaching in Spanish from the beginning. But mostly the teaching will fall on the shoulders of Vicente, and we will do our best to support and encourage him until we speak the language as well. The Bible translation is in progress. They have 73% of the New Testament in Guarijío and portions of the Old Testament. We don’t know yet if we will someday help in finishing the translation, because one of the missionaries who was there, now living in the states, is still working on it.

Thank you for you for partnering with us in prayer and support in God's work among the Guarijío of Mexico. If you have any questions, concerns or input we'd love to hear from you!

In Christ,
Don and Chrissy Chubb

The view from our front porch.

Prayer Requests:

• That Chrissy would finish Spanish when she tests in May 
• For financial provision for our teammates 
• That we would be able to plan well and take care of all the necessary paperwork before moving into the mountains. 
• And above all that God would use us to make disciples and glorify himself among the Guarijío people.