Hi to you, all our wonderful prayer and financial supporters, and those of you following along. We hope you had a blessed Christmas focusing on the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ. Also, happy New Year to you as well. We just got to celebrate it sooner as we are 15 hours ahead of you. We thank God for you all!

Update on the Q people

December has come and gone and we did not receive an invitation from the Q people group to come live with them. So with that our team has met and discussed what could be next for our three families. We are thankful for the time we got to survey and learn about the Q people. We now give those reports and documents off to others and pray for God to make a way for His clear Gospel of grace to be shared with them. I’m excited to see what the Lord will do for them and who He has planned to minister to them.

New Direction

While we are no longer pursuing the Q people, there are many other ministry needs for us and our team. We are excited about the options before us and there is some research that needs to happen first. One thing our leadership here has asked of us in the meantime is to go around to the indigenous churches and see what their needs are and how our organization can assist them. These are locations that have had missionaries in the past but are now on their own. Some are still like infant believers while others need more direction and guidance in how to study their Bibles.

We will be visiting each church to check on them and make a survey of what their needs are. Once we survey all the churches we will give a report to leadership of how the churches are doing and how Ethnos 360 can assist them. The goal in this is equipping and promoting autonomy of the church in PNG.

If you remember, we the Shaieblys, live in the Eastern Region (affectionately called the Islands region) of Papua New Guinea. We will be surveying the churches in our region of ministry. In Eastern there are three provinces. West New Britain (where we live), East New Britain (we did our Bush Orientation here) and New Ireland.

New Ireland Province

Above you can see New Ireland Province in red. This week our family will be moving to New Ireland for about two months. While there for two months we will be doing two things.

We will be helping to look after the mission center with our team.
Church Survey. Our team will begin visiting churches in the province to check in on them.

We are excited to help our region out in this way and also get out and be with the churches in New Ireland.

Ways you can be praying for us:

Our flight this week to Kavieng, PNG.
For our family as we take on roles for the small mission center we are looking after. We will be over seeing some employees and other things while there.
For our team mates ,Poulsens and Ewerts, who will join us in a few weeks to begin church surveys.
Please continue to pray for the Q people group. While it may not be our team going to them this year, we continue to pray for them to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ someday.

Friends, we are so thankful for you and that you are praying for us, our family and our team. I would love to be praying for you and your family. Please email me anytime and let me know how I can be going to God on your behalf.

Now off to pack!

The Shaieblys

Mike, Lauren, Eleanor, Lydia and Gabriel

Here are some things we have been up to in December