Student Profiles & Course Descriptions NEW

Tayler and Lorin Norris with Eden, Deacon, and Enoch www.missions2moz.org

By Tayler Norris

In the early 1980s, my parents were reached with the Gospel through military missions while they were stationed in Germany as young Airmen. Little did they know that they would someday have five sons, including me, who would be born in Portugal while they were involved in a military mission church. Later in life, I would go on a missions trip to Zambia, Africa, and through that trip, God would burden my heart to give my life to be a missionary to the foreign field.

My call to the mission field was a culmination of my parents keeping missions as an important part of our family life. Growing up, our family attended every service of our church’s missions conferences. My brothers and I were always the first ones at the missionaries’ display tables asking questions. There were many times that my family opened the doors of our home to house missionaries while they were presenting at our church. At a young age, I was taught to not only give my tithes but also to give to missions on a monthly basis. I remember the napkin holder that sat in our dining room, stuffed with hundreds of missionary prayer cards. These were some of the things God used to prepare my heart to surrender to take the Gospel to the lost.

Alejandro and Josefina RojasI was born in a town in Baja California, Mexico, into a Roman Catholic family. In 1984, my grandmother gave me a book in Spanish entitled All About Mexico. It told of the various Christian denominations in Mexico. I decided that when I lived in a big city with a Presbyterian Church, I would attend it. Later, when I lived in Puebla, Mexico, I found a phone number of the Presbyterian church in the yellow pages. I called and asked how I could be a member of the church. The person said I needed to accept Jesus Christ. He explained to me the plan of salvation, and I accepted Christ as my Savior.

BBTI student Ben MuldoonSimeon, a deaf man in Ghanta City, Liberia, sat nearly eight hours to hear doctrine and Scriptures explained to him in Sign Language. However, he was still hungry for more. Here was a man that could honestly sing, “More about Jesus would I know.” The image of this young deaf man that was eager and hungry for truth is etched in my memory.

I grew up in a pastor’s home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and was saved at age seven. My parents raised their children to be involved in church ministry and to have a burden for the world. My dad, Wil Muldoon, was called into overseas missions at age sixty-one, and he is still serving in Papua New Guinea at age seventy. His commitment to follow Christ has had a profound impact on my life.

by Reese Parfitt

In Situational Language Learning, we practice a careful, orderly method that can be used to obtain language from any speaker of any foreign language. The idea is to be able to take control of our learning so we won’t need to rely on an officially-trained teacher or a language school as we venture into learning a foreign language. Our class time involves a short time of instruction about the concepts and method, but the bulk of our time is spent practicing that method by using an actual language.

We have two language informants who are fluent speakers of French and Mandarin Chinese. I am in the Chinese group. We start by asking for object-like words, and write them down in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). We methodically progress into longer utterances which we can handle better and better as we learn the sounds.

The first class I faced as a student at BBTI was Articulatory Phonetics, a study of how sounds relating to language are produced by the human mouth. The amount of knowledge and enjoyment students get from this class depends on the students’ level of participation. Phonetics is a hands-on, or rather lips-on, course. As well as learning the theory behind how sounds are made, students are required to learn how to record and reproduce all the sounds that they hear. Like any skill, phonetics takes practice, so much class time is spent doing oral drills (which to the uninitiated sounds like an international market).