Tom and Benaiah Visit

Cassidy • June 9, 2026

We recently enjoyed time with Benaiah and Tom who were here to visit us for 10 days.


Tom is a seminary student who got connected with us and is interested in the work we do here. He loves the Biblical languages and is interested in maybe using his knowledge of them to translate the Bible.

Benaiah is our first teammates' son! Most of you know Matt and Cameron Dodd who served with us here with their kids until 2016 when they went home and Matt passed away. Benaiah just finished his first year at the Master's College and wanted to return to serve us and to share his testimony with the people here.

Since Benaiah goes to our home church, Grace Bible Church, he was able to bring gifts from our support team there! Both he and Tom graciously filled their bags with items for us and squished all their clothes into their carry ons.

Tom had so many good questions - he spent hours, especially with Zach, asking about missions and life.

We told Benaiah that the best way to serve us was to spend time with our boys... and spend time with our boys he DID. Benaiah created choose-your-own-adventure stories and the boys would sit for hours choosing their paths, fighting pirates/enemy spaceships/outlaws, and so on. Benaiah would also draw pictures to go along with these stories. The boys were in awe and loved it.

Tom and Benaiah even played D&D with our boys and Zach one night.

The boys also made sure to take the guys on their favorite hikes to the various waterfalls and rivers.

Jude enjoying the Kasang:

I began teaching literacy in the trade language for those who have already completed the Do class. Tom and Benaiah joined in class one day and the students were happy to teach them some new Pidgin phrases:

The highlight for us was when Benaiah and Tom got to share their testimonies during the Sunday morning church service.


During Benaiah's testimony, he shared about how impactful it was to see that his dad, though saddened to leave his family and to be kept from returning to the people here, was not afraid to die. Matt knew he was going to see his Savior Jesus. There were many tears.

There was a notable response, too, from a man here who has been very hostile to us in the past.

We had a great time with them! Thank you to everyone who supported their trip here.

And now, life continues for us. While many of you stateside are celebrating school graduations, we are getting a head start on next school year!

Our goal is to get 16 weeks of school done before we leave on furlough. This will give us more flexibility for travel and visiting when we return to the US this fall.

You can pray for us! The next four months will be extremely busy for Zach and I, and monotonous for the kids - especially the boys. Please pray for wisdom and graciousness for us, and for contentment and joy for each of our kids.

Madang, Moresby, and Ukarumpa

By Cassidy • June 6, 2026
Our boys finished school on April 27, and then we took a break out of the village! It was a good chance for a rest and we had paperwork to attend to, so we ended up in 3 different places in 2 weeks. Finished with 6th:

Literacy Goes to Kongo

By Cassidy • April 9, 2026
As I wrote in the post "A Busy March," we have been working toward establishing literacy in a village a couple mountains away - Kongo. Kongo is still among the same language group and they heard that we had a class available to learn to read and write in their heart language, Do (pronounced Doe). And so they sent six men to come and take part in our literacy class last year. For the sake of this post, let me introduce them here: Dewiwi (the leader among them), Iramo, Simit, Dawa, Parati, and Idige. After they graduated, we started making plans for them to teach others in their own village. The deal is: they must to have enough people finish literacy that they can appoint 3-4 as teachers, they need to build a classroom, and they need to have community support (ie: not just one family who wants to start literacy somewhere). If a village can do all this then we will pay for and print all the materials. In March, these six Kongo graduates hiked back over to us and set up a meeting to tell us that all was ready! Do we have materials for them? Would I be willing to come next month to an opening of the Do literacy class in Kongo Village? Yes and yes. They hiked all the books, a big wooden box (to hold them), two chalkboards (!), and a bunch of smaller miscellaneous supplies to Kongo and then Monday we set out to visit them.

Jude is Fourteen!

By Cassidy • April 9, 2026
Last week we celebrated Jude's birthday! We had a special lunch, cake, presents, and games. Birthdays here are twice as fun with teammates!

A Busy March

By Cassidy • March 29, 2026
I know there are some seasons, at least I HOPE, where our updates are more frequent and therefore can be regarding a single area of ministry. That is not the case currently, but I am thankful that we are busy with good things over here - for the praise of God's Name! The picture above shows a recent visitor, affectionately called Mr. D, who came to help and to spend time with the Millers. A close family friend and professional carpenter, he and Josh put up the office, constructed a permanent awning for us, and oversaw the demolition of a storage shed that had served to house building materials ever since the earthquake. The new office:

The Brutally Brief Biography of Eneas Sage

By Zach Cann • March 4, 2026
I was reading a biography recently. It was a relatively short biography of John MacDonald, which takes up a single chapter in Iain Murray's book A Scottish Christian Heritage . And in that chapter there is an introductory paragraph about a man who was a missionary pioneer in northern Highlands of Scotland. His name was Eneas Sage, and his whole life fit quite neatly on the first half of page 130. Evidently, Sage moved into the town of Lochcarron in 1726 and ministered there till he died in 1774. Murray provides Sage's own testimony that he went to this dark and cold place "merely to pave the way, if it were practicable, for settling the bounds with a gospel ministry, though it should be at the peril of my life." And peril he faced. His house was burned down and at least three attempts were made on his life. After six years of work, there was one family coming to hear him preach in a tiny thatched church. After 20 years of laboring, he was still treated as an outsider and had to evade yet another assassination attempt. But at the end of nearly 50 years of toil, there were some who "were themselves the primitive fathers of the spiritual generations that followed them." And with that line, the story of Eneas Sage came to an end, and the story moved on to recount the accomplishments of others. A whole ministry boiled down into a paragraph. 50 hard and lonely years, summarized in just a few sentences. A whole life that serves as an introduction to the next. Yet I cannot help but admire how the Lord Jesus used Eneas Sage. Someone had to go and start tilling that soil. And that is exactly what Sage did. He paved the way—just like he intended to do. And while he is literally what we might call a footnote on the pages of history, his toil mattered to his Master. And who cares what history records, so long as at the end of our labors we get to hear the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master" (Matthew 25:23).

Equipping Hour on Mark 6

By Cassidy • March 4, 2026
Zach recently recorded a Sunday school hour for our local church. The first ten minutes are few videos with the kids of some new things on our ridge. The rest of the video is about the challenge of determining story breaks in Mark. Specifically, he discussed Mark 6 and the connection between the sending out of the disciples and Herod's beheading of John. See below if you are interested!

The Millers Have Landed

By Cassidy • January 22, 2026
Please join us in welcoming our new teammates: Josh and Autumn Miller! We got to know the Millers about 3.5 years ago. We were living in Madang following the earthquake that knocked down our home in Mawerero. And the Millers' were in Madang to bring a season of ministry to a close. And so, as the Lord would have it, we were neighbors for about 6 months. We got to spend lots of time together and fellowship with them was so sweet as we both dealt with trials. Soon after, the president of FinisTerre starting discussions with both of us about the possibility of the Millers joining our team in Mawerero. Fast forward through more transition for them, a new baby, raising support, and house building... and yesterday they landed on our ridge and moved into their new home and new ministry!

Married 15 years

By Zach Cann • January 22, 2026
15 years, 7 homes, 4 kids, 2 continents later...

Oliver Turns 12 + Christmas

By Cassidy • January 17, 2026
Oliver turned 12 last week! This guy brings joy to us. He is able to laugh at himself, he loves snuggling his sisters, and he is funny. He is also creative - he loves to draw maps and write stories. He loves Dungeons and Dragons and made up a game with D&D figurines that he likes to play. He LOVES board games and card games. He put together a schedule by the hour of how we would celebrate. :) We had a fun lunch of pizza pockets, followed by pazookie, and party games.

Literacy Graduation for Class 5

By Cassidy • December 18, 2025
The day we returned from Madang we found out that the literacy class had finished their last class a few days earlier and just wanted to wait for us to arrive before doing the graduation ceremony! I am so proud of these teachers and these students. They worked hard and have now learned how to read and write all the sounds in the Do language. The ceremony was completely planned out by the students, using the pattern of the previous classes. The singing was accompanied by the ladies who are in the reading class, which was so sweet to see.