South meets West. (Uganda) from UTB THEWORDCONNECTS on Vimeo.

Find out more about how your church could be involved with Bible translation through a similar Wycliffe InFocus project.

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This is the kind of difference having God’s word in our heart language makes.  350+million people still do not have a word of scripture in their language.  You can make a difference for them.  Give the Story.

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In the coming weeks, there will be lots of opportunities for the team to engage with the local church and community, and observe Bible translation in progress.  Team members will be spending a weekend staying with a local Christian family in their own compound – as well as helping with the corn harvest in the fields; an intimate and challenging encounter with life in Cameroon.  They will be building relationships, listening and learning, being prepared to learn some of the language! 

There will also be an opportunity to work with local children’s workers to implement a childrens holiday Bible club programme with a difference!  The programme is enabling the children to learn in their own mother tongue.  In many countries, as in Cameroon, education is often delivered in the national language, a language that is unfamiliar and hard for children to understand. 

Find out more about Engage teams.  Follow the team on Twitter.

More opportunities to go.

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They will have seen firsthand that “Connection is everything” (as the tagline for “The Visitor” states, see our last blog post), not least in discovering how God’s word in the mother tongue communicates like nothing else.  No doubt, as they settle back in at home, they will be seeing their own culture with new eyes, and perhaps questioning some things they have always taken as given.

Sharing experience across cultures is a huge privilege.  We are enriched as we learn to see the world through others’ eyes, and it is good to become more aware that we are part of a global church, made up of people from ‘every tribe and language and people and nation’ (Revelation 5v9).

Many of us have easy access to God’s word in our own mother tongue, the language we understand best.  But as the Engage teams to Indonesia and Cambodia have seen, there are still many without any scripture in their language.  How can they connect with God without it?

Please pray for those who are still waiting for God’s word in their language, and for those who are working to make it available.  A third Engage team flys out soon to Cameroon for a month.  Pray they will also have an enriching time and be an encouragement to the community they are visiting.

Find out more about Engage Teams.

Join with us to Give the Story.

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One amusing scene that stands out is about a New York woman buying wares from Zainab at the market, and trying to make conversation.  She notes Zainab’s african background with, “Oh, where are you from?”  To which Zainab replies, “I’m from Senegal”.  The New Yorker stumbles on with, “Ah yes, I was in Cape Town last year.  Lovely, isn’t it?”

As the New Yorker departs the market, Zainab’s neighbouring stall holder asks, “How far is Senegal from Cape Town?”  “About 8,000 km.” replies Zainab, with a sigh.

Trying so hard to ‘connect’ but failing catastrophically. 

It can be a real challenge for churches in the West to connect with individuals from different cultures.  Even with the variety of nationalities living in towns and cities across the UK, it’s really easy for us to fall into the trap of labelling groups of people rather than considering the experiences of individuals.  How often do we talk about the, ‘situation in Africa’, without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that the 54 countries that make up this continent each contain a variety of cultures, languages and social conditions and a total population in excess of 1,000,000,000.

An idea

Next time you are speaking about connecting with different cultures, whether it’s in the context of encouraging individuals to consider going overseas, or simply trying to help your church reach out to the local estate; you could use the market scene from The Visitor as an effective illustration.  It’s an excellent scene for highlighting that we can often make assumptions, or speak from a position of ignorance, when we would be better to take some time to ask questions and listen to the experiences of the other person.

Could you play a part in making the connection?  Give the Story.

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Throughout 2011, Biblefresh, a movement of churches, agencies, colleges and festivals is seeking to encourage and inspire churches across the UK to a greater confidence and appetite for the Word of God.  There will be an emphasis on reading the Bible, being trained in handling the Bible well, and providing the opportunity for people to experience the Bible in new ways.  But there’s one more priority.

During the year we would like to encourage churches and Christians in the UK to make a real difference in one country where people are still waiting for their own Bible.  Burkina Faso is a landlocked nation in West Africa, where many groups of people are still waiting for God’s word in the language they understand best.  We hope that you will join with the Bible Society and Wycliffe Bible Translators to make a difference in this country.

To mark the start of this project, an event will be taking place at St Paul’s Church in Central London, to which you are warmly invited. Daniel Bourdanne, who is now the General Secretary of IFES, but was born in Chad and has spent periods of his life living and studying across a number of West African countries, will be speaking on the subject of the Bible for the Whole World.

In addition, worship will be led by Jacques Sankara, a dynamic and enthusiastic worship leader from Burkina Faso.

We would love to see you there!
Please register now, to help us in planning the event.

Speaker: Daniel Bourdanne – General Secretary of IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students)
Where: St Paul’s Church, Robert Adam Street, London, W1U 3HW.
When: Tuesday, 16th November, 2010.
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Questions: communications_uk@wycliffe.org

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These artists seek to convey the context of Biblical action and communicate it through illustrations.  They have found this profoundly challenging and life-changing, as you can read in the extract below from the DOOR website…

What is a storyboard?

Deaf artists are working with Deaf translation teams in Kenya at DOOR-Africa to draw a frame for each action, concept or visual step of the biblical story.  This storyboard becomes a memory tool for those who have seen the story to help them remember it accurately when they do not have DVD access.  It also is a great hand-out for Deaf youth and children in Deaf school. And, finally, it is entered digitally into the computer and used as a back-drop behind the signer on the Deaf visual Bible.

The result?  Quality work that has an impact!  Read what a professional artist wrote when she saw the storyboard on the first 32 Bible stories “Know God How?” …

“As a professional artist with some experience in different behind the scenes aspects of the Motion Picture Industry, I have seen many storyboards. I have never seen better artwork done by trained professional storyboard artists.  And then to realize that these artists are untrained, and deaf, yet gifted with such skill is a startling example of God reaching people with The Truth.”  Jane G.

Deaf Bible artist, SN, and his three man team take their work very serious, carefully researching what clothes looked like in each story, what the buildings looked like, even what colors to use.  SN signed about his work: artist drawing:

“I have to meditate on the stories in order to draw them. It causes me to walk much closer with the Lord. I am always thinking about the stories, and about the culture, and how I can communicate the Bible to other Deaf people.”

“My favorite Bible story is when Jesus was crucified. When Jesus was whipped, when you see the picture, you just feel like it really happened. It was so powerful having to draw the blood after he had been lashed. I feel those experiences and I feel the sadness. I can’t believe that I was the one drawing it!  I think the Deaf people, when they see the stories; they will feel that same impact in their life.”

Did you know there’s a need for artists in Bible Translation?  Here’s another example of an artist putting his skills to work – Stephen, who took a GAP year in Ethiopia and created illustrations for use in Literacy and AIDs awareness materials.  These and many more roles are waiting to be filled.  Could you be a part of what God is doing?

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Anée wept bitterly as she held her baby close to her chest. She was filled with a confusion of anger, grief and guilt. She was supposed to have taken the medicine herself and the baby would have benefitted through her milk. But she didn’t understand the doctor’s instructions, and she can’t read, so she gave the medicine directly to her baby. Her newborn daughter died from a tragic and avoidable overdose. Information poverty kills.

Anée was the wife of our night guard, Beltoise when we lived in Chad. Their angry grief made me angry too. The doctor should have known that 80% of Chadian women are illiterate. He should have known that she probably needed to be told what to do. Anée had been to primary school, but since everything was in French she had understood so little that by the time she left she was still unable to read. Children who learn to read and write in their mother tongue before bridging to the official language flourish and fly, while those who have to do it all in French often flounder and fail. It still troubles me that while in the UK only six children out of 1,000 live births die before the age of five, in Chad it’s 200 children. So many of those deaths are avoidable. There is a direct link between mothers being able to read and infant mortality. Mothers who can read have children who live longer.

Hope for the future

But there is hope! The Chadian government is starting to explore teaching in the mother tongue in primary school. They are also promoting the use of Chadian languages for adult literacy. But that can’t happen without the right resources. For decades Wycliffe staff have been analysing languages and producing guides to understanding grammar, dictionaries and literacy materials. These are essential to good Bible translation, but they are invaluable for multilingual schools too.

Our work in many developing countries is not only enabling people to find spiritual healing and nourishment, but physical healing and nourishment too. One of the booklets our teams translated into several languages of Chad was a very simple guide on how to treat a baby with diarrhoea. It’s so simple: sterile water, salt and sugar can save the life of a sick child. In the 15 years since it was translated that little booklet has probably saved hundreds of lives. To quote Nobel Prize winner Sir William Lewis “The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge”.

The pendulum effect

I really enjoyed watching Alice in Wonderland at the cinema with my wife and children earlier this year. “Contrariwise” said Tweedledee as he bickered with Tweedledum. Two people contradicting each other just for the sake of it makes for entertaining comedy, but it’s a disastrous way to develop theology. Somebody overstates their case, so somebody else feels the need to counter that position by overstating an opposing view. Before long we have polarised an argument into two unbiblical, but firmly-held positions.

Parts of the church have done this with evangelism and social action, promoting one to the exclusion of the other. This was starkly illustrated last month by an American TV show host who encouraged Christians to leave churches that worked for “social justice” because he believed it to be just a code for “communism”! Any church that treats a person as either just-a-soul-that-needs-saving, or just-a-body-that- needs-feeding has definitely lost the plot. Jesus both taught and fed the five thousand.

Wycliffe’s Integral Mission

Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK is a member of an international family of organisations called Wycliffe Bible Translators International (WBTI). WBTI is a member of the Micah Network, a group of over 300 Christian agencies committed to Integral Mission. Integral mission is “the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. It is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. If we ignore the world we betray the word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the word of God we have nothing to bring to the world. Justice and justification by faith, worship and political action, the spiritual and the material, personal change and structural change belong together.” (micahnetwork.org).

Wycliffe’s language development work produces transformed lives through the translated Word and through translated development information. People grow better crops and live better lives. They care for their environment and they care for their neighbours. They learn about justification by faith and oral rehydration solution. Wycliffe’s work brings both spiritual and material blessing.

Development agencies such as World Vision and Save the Children are increasingly paying attention to these issues. My current role involves working with such agencies to help them better understand the roles culture and language can play in development. So is Wycliffe becoming a development agency? No, our core purpose is still clearly in focus, but we are not blind to the broader consequences of our work. Language development is holistic ministry, meeting the needs of people who still have both body and soul.

Dave Pearson was Director of the Chad Branch of SIL from 1991 to 1998. He currently serves as a Language Development Advocate, helping UN agencies and NGOs to better integrate language issues into their development work.

Article first published in the May 2010 Issue of Wycliffe Bible Translators’ UK magazine “Words for Life” .

Find out more about working as a literacy specialist with Wycliffe, or check out the new MA Literacy Programme Development.

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Engage team in Camaroon 2009

Clare Orr is a member of Newtownbreda (St John’s) Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland. She shares a little about what she’s expecting on the Presbyterian Mission Overseas (PMO) website,

On 2 July I will be travelling to Kalimantan, the Borneo part of Indonesia, with a team of five people. We will spend a month with one of Wycliffe’s partners, a local Bible translation organisation.

You can read the rest of Clare’s expectations on the PMO website.

The teams will be sharing their experiences on Twitter and through the Engage pages of the Wycliffe website. If you find their stories interesting, or would like to experience for yourself the excitement of what God is doing around the world through Bible translation, keep an eye on the website for details of how you could apply for a team in 2011.

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Over the last 6 weeks, more than 3,700 Christians in the UK have attended the From Eden to Eternity tour, a drama that brings the story of the Bible to life in a little over an hour.  As the impact of the drama still resonates in the UK, the influence of the tour is spreading as far as Nigeria, where Bible translation work is bringing the story of the Bible to life for a group of four Koro languages.

Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK asked the Saltmine Theatre Company to produce this show to remind UK Christians of the value of the Bible. During May and June it toured 27 venues across England.

Night after night audiences were profoundly impacted as they saw the highs and lows of God’s Story, the Bible, played out in front of their eyes.  One person commented,

“I was absolutely enthralled by this performance, as I think was everyone else. The mixture of humor and drama is really moving, and ensures that the message gets across. Thank you so much for coming!” 

We had people laughing out loud, we had pastors in tears.  No matter where we went, Saltmine translated the Bible in a way that touched people’s hearts and lives.

But there are still over 353 million people worldwide who do not have access to this Story in any form, including around 250,000 Koro people in Nigeria.  At each venue, after the drama that Saltmine presented, a Wycliffe representative offered a challenge to help make the Bible come alive for these people groups in Nigeria. And, each night, people in the audiences responded in a very generous fashion. On one occasion someone was so inspired by the opportunity to see God’s word transform these communities that they pledged to sponsor the translation of the entire book of Colossians. 

After two successful years, plans are already in place to tour From Eden to Eternity again next year.  If you would be interested in having the event at your church in March 2011, contact us at communications_uk@wycliffe.org.  Review highlights of the tour can be seen at www.eden2eternity.org  and if you would like to, there’s still an opportunity to sponsor the translation of a scripture verse.

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