ITEC/Steve Saint: Why Engineers?

ITEC

Why Engineers?
By Steve Saint

After the Waodani and I buried Aunt Rachel out in the jungles in 1994, members of the Gikitaidi clan of Waodani told me they wanted to talk.

This group included three of the men and one of the women who had participated in the attack that speared my dad Nate, Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming to death in 1956. These Waodani were Christ-followers who had accepted Aunt Rachel and made her, and then me, family. Two of the men in the group had baptized my sister Kathy and me when we were teenagers.

What they wanted to tell me was that they had decided that now that Aunt Rachel was gone, it was time for me to return to Ecuador to live with them. They didn’t ask me to return, they were telling me they had decided I was going to return.

Multi-cultural people switch their thought patterns much like most of us who are multilingual switch languages. I was listening to them telling me to return to live with them in the Waodani language with some Spanish translation,  but I was processing their request in the North American part of my brain.
"They Don't Teach Us To Do"

I asked them what they wanted me to do. Dawa, who Aunt Rachel had always told me was my Waodani grandmother, scolded me. “We don’t say, come and do. All the foreigners come and do, but they don’t teach us to do.”

Then they asked me if God’s Carvings (Bible) teach that all Christ-followers are supposed to teach other people to Walk God’s Trail. I answered, “Yes.”

The Waodani proceeded to explain that they needed tools and training so they could continue to do what Aunt Rachel, Aunt Betty Elliot, Kathy Peek, Rosie Jung, Jim Yost, Pat Kelly, missionary pilots, nurses, doctors, radio technicians, and others had been doing for them for almost 40 years.

They were right. God’s Carvings say that all Christ-followers are supposed to be involved in spreading Jesus’ Good News to everyone everywhere.

“What do you want to be able to do?” I asked. The group of Waodani Christ-followers explained thoughtfully that they wanted to learn to do the tooth thing, the medicine thing, the eye thing, the fixing thing, the airplane thing, and the radio thing. Now people like the Waodani have asked us to do the video thing, the farming thing and the trauma counseling thing.

That is easier asked than done. Most of the group of Waodani had no money, no math, no reading skills, no mechanical training, no computer skills. Their little jungle villages had no electricity, no tools, no telephones, and no stores. That is why ITEC came into being!
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$5 Off The Great Omission

In this powerful call for the inclusion of indigenous believers in the Great Commission, Steve Saint shows how current missions strategies have unwittingly harmed the indigenous church and kept millions of believers from fulfilling their roles in God’s Kingdom—and millions of others from hearing the Good News.

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