‘God comforts me in Welsh’

Speaking Welsh as a family

Lowri grew up in Wales and both home and school life were lived in Welsh. Speaking Welsh as a family was particularly special for her parents.

‘My dad is not a first language Welsh speaker,’ she explains. ‘He met my mum at university. My mum is from Dolgellau in north Wales, from a farming family. My dad had learnt Welsh at school, but he’d never really got on with it.’

‘It’s older than the King James!’ explains Lowri. ‘As a child –even as a first language Welsh speaker, who went to a Welsh school and spoke Welsh at home – it was still a version of Welsh that I had never heard. Nobody in living memory had spoken that way.’

Lowri’s mother would read Scripture to her in Welsh, but it sounded foreign. ‘I remember feeling it had this sort of mystical sound to it.’

A modern Welsh Bible

But over those same decades, work was underway on a new Welsh translation.

Arfon Jones describes his work as ‘a colloquial translation of the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew.’ Completing it took 20 years. A firebrand Welsh nationalist in his youth, Jones attended Bala-Bangor Theological College in the 1970s. And he has been a key figure in the Welsh-language Christian community.

Checking methods

Jones adopted the same translation checking methods that are used by local Bible translators around the world – getting the translation reviewed by an expert. But also sharing drafts with people from the community. So the result is not just an accurate Bible, but one that can be used and understood.

The complete Bible was finally launched in 2013. At the time, Lowri was working for the Evangelical Movement of Wales and was aware of Arfon Jones’ work, so knew the day was coming.

‘I was in the office,’ she remembers. ‘We’d just been sent the information – here it is, it’s online now.’

Reading it was the first time for Lowri that God’s words felt as close as the conversations at home.

Lowri knows what it is like to be waiting to read God’s words in your own language for the first time. And wanting others to experience the deep joy of having the Bible in their language too led her to join Wycliffe as Trusts Fundraising Manager in 2023.

Instantly connected

Not long after Lowri started at Wycliffe, she heard a story from a Bible translator in Mali, West Africa. The translator was asked why it was so important to have God’s words in his own language.

He replied,

‘When people are hurt, they cry out in their mother tongue. It’s important that we can show them that God understands their cries.’ Lowri instantly connected with those words. ‘I remember thinking, oh yes, I totally understand this. It made my hair stand on end.’

‘People can have this idea that if you can read the Bible in English anyway, why do you need it in your own language? It’s a similar situation to what we hear from Bible translators in other countries. People say, “Why do they need a Bible? Isn’t there one that they can already understand?” But there’s a difference. It’s the language that most naturally comes to your tongue when you speak. To feel as though you can’t access your faith in that language, it gives a sense that maybe that’s not as important to God.

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