Our Story

We are Alex and Erin Williams. We're missionaries with Ethnos360 serving in the Philippines and this is our story.

Where We've Been... 

     We both started this journey with Ethnos360 by attending New Tribes Bible Institute in Jackson, MI, where we first met. After graduating the two year program, We got married in July 2010 then took a year off to be married outside of a training atmosphere for a while. It was time well spent working full time jobs and spending time with our church.

        In January 2012 we moved to the Missionary Training Center in Missouri to finish our training to become cross-cultural church planters. We were there for a year and a half studying the practical side of ministry in a different culture. We had classes on everything from outdoor living and phonetics to literacy, field health, and church development. We graduated from the MTC in May 2013.

     The next leg of our journey was Ministry Partnership Development (Which is the Ethnos360 title for support raising). Our experience was a joyous one! We were surrounded by love and encouragement from both of our home churches. We had so many people join our team through prayer and finances. Our hearts will always be filled with gratitude towards both of our churches and families for how they've supported us.

 
    We are currently at 91% of our monthly support goal. Praise God for the body of Christ!


            Moving ever closer to our goal we arrived in the Philippines in October 2014 to learn one of the main languages used here, Tagalog. We lived in Bataan for about two years learning all we could about life here in the Philippines and how to speak at a conversational level.

      We took our first furlough in December 2016 to have our daughter, Hinley.

       We returned to the Philippines August 2017 with the goal of building our house out in our permanent ministry location. This meant tying up loose ends in our Tagalog language study then doing PGA (People Group Assessment). After a lot of hard work exploring our options and plenty of prayer we decided to minister to the Northern Isnag! Next came the very long process of building our house and our coworkers house. Now we have a place to call home out in the middle of the jungle. It was a long time coming (11 years!) and we are so thrilled to have reached this point in our journey.

.... WHERE WE ARE

   

    We traveled to Indiana in November 2019 to have our son, Beau. He has his own amazing story of how God healed his heart, but that's a story you can find in our blog posts. 

And now we are stuck! Covid has halted our plans. We are living with Alex's parents until the Philippines reopens travel to foreigners. It looks like that won't happen until a vaccine is widely available. We long to return, but the Lord has asked us to be patient and wait for His timing. Goodness it is hard to wait sometimes! Though the Lord just keeps providing for us no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in.

When we do get to go back, The next big phase of our life will be learning a tribal language, Northern Isnag. This should take roughly 3 years if everything goes according to plan. We'll likely take another furlough after that then comes some of the seriously exciting stuff! We already have a translation of the Bible done in Northern Isnag so we can dive head first into making Bible lesson to teach through.

NTM's timeline for planting a church can take roughly 15-20 years. That seems like a long time but the end result is a mature church that can function on it's own and take the gospel to places that missionaries will never be able to go! They will have God's Word in their own language for generations to come and elders and teachers who can raise up the next generation to have a relationship with God.

        So that's the plan for now! If you would like to be a part of what God is doing in the unreached people groups of the Philippines please look at our Get Involved page.