Missionary of the Week:

Terry Gibbs

Terry is a member of First Baptist Church of Los Altos and, until the early 1980’s, worked here in the Santa Clara Valley as a computer engineer.  He and his wife, Lynn, then felt the Lord’s call to missions.  He very tentatively contacted Wycliffe Bible Translators, asking if they might be able to use him.  Their response was immediate, asking, “How soon can you get here?”  He has been with Wycliffe since that time, on the very forefront of developing computer-assisted language development and translation.

Lynn suffered from cancer and went home to be with the Lord in June, 2004.  Terry and Lynn have two daughters: Jamie, 21, who is a pilot and will soon complete her senior year as a cadet at the Air Force Academy in Colorado.  She is engaged to a fellow cadet and they plan to marry this year after graduation, on May 30.  Leilani, age 20, is at Drexel University in Pennsylvania.  She has suffered from health problems that lead to exhaustion.  Doctors think now that it is a thyroid problem.

Terry has been teaching at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and enjoys the training times with the students and consulting on the more difficult language analysis problems that come up.  His students are from various East Asian countries and will return to their homelands to pursue Bible translation projects in their native languages.

Address: 186/109 Chiang Mai-Hod Road, MU 7 World Club,
Chiang Mai, 50230 THAILAND           
e-mail: terry_gibbs@sil.org

16 Sunday  ~  Missionary of the Week: Terry Gibbs, Thailand (Wycliffe). There are currently 1,953 translation projects in process around the world. Wycliffe is involved in 1,415 (75%) of these projects.  Please pray that these translations will move ahead quickly.

17 Monday  ~ Beth Bryson, a former member of FBCLA who serves in translation projects, is currently in Thailand with a new group of people who work with “clusters”, which are several languages that are closely related to each other.  Please pray for Beth as she continues in computer linguistics.

18 Tuesday  ~  Our Ministry Team in Southwest Asia has a variety of evangelistic tools to raise awareness of Christ and the Gospel message.  They meet on Sundays with their national brothers and sisters. It is a small group, but more stop by to visit each week. They have an active web site, a country-wide correspondence course and fellowship for area pastors.

19 Wednesday  ~ Radha and Samen Manickam, Cambodia (Missions Door). Please pray that God will raise up more national leaders so that they will be able to focus on His ministry alone and not need to fill part-time jobs. A pastor needs just $150/month to maintain ministry.

20 Thursday  ~ John and Estera Vatran, Romania (WV). Please pray for four village churches in which John and Estera serve with other young pastors, who are in training.  They celebrated two events for New Years Eve with 200+ youth.  They were very wonderful evenings, but John needed to preach twice in churches the next day after staying up all night with the youth.  He needs our prayers as he seeks every opportunity to reach another chance to share God’s truth to all.

21 Friday  ~  Steve and Laura Reed, Director of Ministry Dev. (Missions Door). Partnership Ministries is beginning to send ministry teams to India.  Steve met with 18 church planters, all raised Hindu, but now planting churches in the countryside where no one else is working and where there are few or no Christians.

22 Saturday  ~  Easter Sunday will be early this year; in fact, this Sunday.  Please enjoy Easter services with us.