Category Archives: Wycliffe

Centre Fellowship – Why Wycliffe Bible Translators?

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A quick break from the Focus films on the resurrection to insert some films from another angle.

I joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK about three and a half years ago. It may seem like a strange move for someone who is only an effective communicator in English, but what most people don’t realise is that the vast majority of roles in this organisation have less to do with language skills and more to do with support for translations projects – whether that’s in teaching, communications, IT, personnel, training, finance, maintenance… My own role involves coordinating and managing communications in the UK. That could be magazines to supporters, promotional material to churches or support for speakers at events. Not so Bibletranslationy really, but equally important in the scheme of things.

On Tuesday this week I was leading our Centre Fellowship time, the point in the week when everyone at the Wycliffe Centre here in Buckinghamshire has the chance to get together. This week I used some Wycliffe films from around the world to remind people about the work we are involved in, whether we are Bible translators, communications guys, IT staff… well you get the picture.

These are the films.

Just some things to think about

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I’m starting to notice that I’m becoming institutionalised. Three years ago, as a newbie with Wycliffe Bible Translators, I found everything new, exciting and amazingly interesting. Now, after being asked for the… well, I’ve lost count… time, which version of the Bible we translate, I’m just wondering if what I accept as blindingly obvious is really so far off the radar of everyone else that we should be making more of it.

For example, the New Scientist has published an article about the fact that the concept of time isn’t necessarily viewed in the same way by every culture.

“HERE and now”, “Back in the 1950s”, “Going forward”… Western languages are full of spatial metaphors for time, and whether you are, say, British, French or German, you no doubt think of the past as behind you and the future as stretching out ahead. Time is a straight line that runs through your body.

Once thought to be universal, this “embodied cognition of time” is in fact strictly cultural. Over the past decade, encounters with various remote tribal societies have revealed a rich diversity of the ways in which humans relate to time (see “Attitudes across the latitudes”). The latest, coming from the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea, is perhaps the most remarkable. Time for the Yupno flows uphill and is not even linear.

Read the full article here

Once I would have found that really interesting, now I just think ‘Duh! Isn’t that obvious?’. Especially as Sue Pearson gave a presentation on this very theme   in a public lecture at Wycliffe last year.

How not to do word studies

We’ve known and spoken about stuff like this for years, is it really still surprising?
OK, maybe the challenges of cross-cultural communication are still surprising to some, but now the website OneNewsNow.com has managed to get a whole article out of the challenges of serving a remote community when a runway becomes unfit for use.

But Bible translation takes more than just sitting down with a native speaker and a Bible. Multiple obstacles must be hurdled. And the hurdles may look different than you think.

In the Philippines, the obstacles don’t necessarily come in the form of government limitations or even in lack of willing missionaries. Sometimes challenges come in packages as simple as transportation.

 read the full article here
Really, do people find that news surprising? Isn’t it obvious? Or is this just institutionalisation showing its hand?
So, for those of you surprised by the preceding observations, some quick bullet pointers.
  • Languages aren’t the same. Some countries have no words for snow, while others have more than one. We may think that the heart is the home for our emotions, others think it’s their liver. Bible translation isn’t as easy as substituting one word for another – if you do you could be communicating the very opposite of what you intend to say. (More info here)
  • Bible translation… missions… don’t just rely on the skills and abilities of a few talented individuals. We need people who can build runways too. Actually, teaching (western kids in western style schools in English), IT, Marketing Communications, video editing, project management, accounting, are all valuable skills without which we are sunk. Do you think you need a MTh to be any use overseas? Someone who can repair a car engine or keep track of the money are just as (if not more) desperately needed. (More info here)

And, in case you were wondering, the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek, not English – so which version do you think we would translate? (More info here)

Bible translation in the news

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If you have been keeping tabs on the media this week, you may have noticed Bible translation coming up in a couple of places.

It began with BBC news talking about the Jamaican Bible.

Just a couple of days later and Eddie Arthur (kouya.net), Executive Director of Wycliffe Bible Translators in the UK, got to write a piece for the Guardian in Comment is Free.

If you’ve got a bit of time and would like to know some more about the Jamaican Patois (Creole) Bible, a partnership between the Bible Society, Wycliffe Jamaica, the Seed Company and the local church, it’s worth watching the following video. It also gives a good overview of what’s involved in Bible translation today.

The authority of the Bible

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Almost two years ago, Wycliffe Bible Translators commissioned some research that showed that Christians, when presented the choice between giving to a charity that fed the hungry or translated the Bible, they’d choose to feed the hungry. The implied message from the research was that it was better to keep someone alive than concern ourselves about their place in eternity.

I should throw a note in here that the choice isn’t really that stark. The work that Wycliffe does in language development contributes to all eight of the Millennium Development Goals. Very often the communities we work in/with are the poorest of the poor and the most marginalised – but more about that another time maybe.

A few months after that research was published, the Evangelical Alliance in the UK released some research that said that the under 25s were, “Less likely to strongly agree that the Bible has supreme authority in guiding their beliefs, views and behaviour.”

I grew up around people who would describe themselves as, ‘Bible believing Christians’, but while they were always willing to talk about the content of the Bible, they were never very good at responding to the challenges of science and culture that seemed to resign the Bible to a place on the bookshelf.

At about the time the research about declining belief in the Bible was published, I heard a message by a minister of a church in the United States, that gave reasons for why the Bible could be trusted. This spurred me on to my own research into the historical accuracy and authority of the Bible.

The result of this has been…

…For the last few months I’ve been speaking in churches about the authority of the Bible, trying to redress the results of the research and encourage Christians to have confidence in the text of the Bible. I’m not an expert in one area, just someone who has found answers to the questions I’ve had and have had the opportunity to share this with others. [Get in touch if you're in the UK and would like me to do this with your church community].

…My confidence has increased in the Bible. It is historically accurate. The events it records really happened. There is a reason for my faith.

The notes I’ve pulled together and the source of most of my research are now up on this blog. They are notes, and there’s always more digging that can be done. Feel free to follow the links to the Authority of the Bible page to see for yourself. I hope they are useful.

Your comments and questions would be welcome.

Reaching the unreachable

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Premier Christian Radio have started their Christmas campaign today. On their website they say,

This Christmas we’re using our National Digital Platform to reach the maximum number of people possible with a message of faith AND hope, the REAL Christmas message. Your gift today will not only support our National Christmas Starts With Christ Campaign .. but will help us keep broadcasting into 2012.

Considering I work for Wycliffe Bible Translators, it would be really easy to take a shot at PCR by pointing out that maybe those that are really unreached are the 300+ million people who live without a single word of Scripture in their own language. But, that isn’t quite right.

You see God loves us all equally, both listeners of PCR and remote communities without access to the Bible in their own language. Sometimes that’s hard to imagine, especially when we can all think of people that are hard to love – but God loves them too. And, he wants us all to know him and love him back. So God does things to get our attention:

  • Christian friends who occasionally bang on a bit about church and God and life and death
  • Church spires and bells
  • Christian radio stations
  • The view of the Oxfordshire countryside on the M40 just past junction 5 (going west)
  • People who love and care for others (in this country and overseas)
  • The force of nature
  • Comfort from a friend when your world’s falling apart

God is in it all, and if we take the time to look for him we will see him.

What does that have to do with PCR’s fundraising campaign?

Well, some people in the UK will find God through PCR and what they broadcast and it would be wrong of me to think that a small community living in isolation in the mountains of Papua New Guinea deserve God more than the people of Warrington, Widnes, Walton-on-Thames or Walthamstow. Really, we all need God, and we shouldn’t assume that we are all going to find him in the same place. PCR can reach people that Bible translators won’t.

So, if you’d like to give to support Premier Christian Radio, please go ahead. Their giving page can be found here.

But there are unreached in this world who can’t even hear about God in their own language. They may know he’s there through what they see around them, but they don’t have the means to get to know him because his words to them are still tied up in foreign languages. God loves them all the same.

If you’d like to give to Wycliffe Bible Translators you can do so online.

Nigerian exploits – interviews, photographs, shaking hands and rough roads

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I’ve just taken a look at my little recording machine. Over the past five days I’ve recorded more than six hours of interviews and spoken to 25 or more people. That doesn’t include the video we recorded during the three days of business meetings, or the many hundreds of photographs that have either been snapped quickly or composed properly.

Not only that, we’ve met at least three village or tribal chiefs, countless district heads, translation chairmen, co-ordinators and project staff. We’ve been sung to by choirs, greeted in churches, and on Sunday we stood up in front of 4,500+ worshippers at the dedication of some offices for the Church of Christ in Nigeria and talked a bit about Bible translation. Quite an experience.

The hospitality here has been extraordinary. Certainly we’ve not gone hungry. There’s been everything from fish to goat and an almost endless supply of rice.

We’ve travelled through some of the most beautiful countryside on some of the world’s worst roads. A twenty kilometre journey that anywhere else would have taken no more than 15 minutes to complete took well over an hour.

Up here on the plateau the temperatures are moderate. At night it’s cool (15 – 20 degrees Celsius) and daytime temperatures up to the low 30s. But off the plateau it can be more extreme. Right now it’s cooler, being the end of the rainy season, but give it a couple of months and standing under a cold shower will be even more appealing.

I’m now trying to get my head around cataloguing material before travelling home. Making sure we have the names of all the people who appear in the pictures, checking that their names are spelt correctly that we know which language we were in at the time. I’ve taken good notes but it’s easier to check while we are here than it is to check by e-mail when we get home.

There’s also the challenge of making sure we have all the images and video that we need before heading home. Once out of the country it’s not so easy to fill in the gaps so it’s important that we do it all now. Too much is way better than not enough.

So for the next two days we will be working around the office. On Friday we get back on the road to Abuja, a 4.5hr journey, before overnighting in the Catholic guest house. On Saturday morning it will be an early start to get the morning flight back to London – I say morning flight, I mean only flight. All things going to plan I should be back in the UK on Saturday afternoon. Here’s hoping it’s still nice and warm!

Does Bible translation matter?

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Around the world there are millions of people living below the poverty line, suffering from the injustice of war, famine and drought. Quite rightly, our hearts are moved, we long to bring relief from suffering and pain. So we give our support to charities that bring food supplies, clean water, shelter because, while Bible translation sounds very noble, very right, it’s not the immediate need so we put that to one side for later. When the problem’s fixed and people can live, then we’ll worry about the Bible message.

But the Bible does matter. It matters to those on the edges of society. Those who have suffered war, famine and drought, because very often the stars of the Bible story are people who have been there. They’ve suffered the worst hardships and yet have found the words to praise God and hope for the future.

Does Bible translation matter? I think it does, and so does Eddie who spoke at Bangor Worldwide this week. You can see what he has to say in this video…

Eddie Arthur – Wycliffe Bible Translators from Bangor Worldwide on Vimeo.

Peanuts for breakfast

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I got up at 5:45 this morning to wave my colleagues off. They’ve gone onto Ghana for another story. The plan was then to go back to bed and sleep until lunchtime because I doubt I’ll get any sleep on tonight’s flight. But, today is going to be hot and by 6:15 it was too warm and light to sleep. So, I’ve been up nibbling peanuts – given to us by one of the pastors we met on our journey and a local product from the Bissa region of Burkina Faso – and writing emails.

The plan for today is to have lunch with a colleague based at the SIL centre here in Ouagadougou before going over to ANTBA (Wycliffe Burkina) for the afternoon. I’m supposed to be ‘resting’ before getting to the airport at 6pm, but sleeping during the day has alluded me for most of the trip. Maybe the early start from today will change that.

I’ve been trying to think of a story that I can share here which will illustrate the experience of being in Burkina Faso, but that won’t steal the thunder from the stories that Hazel has been writing.

I guess last Sunday will stick in my memory for the longest. Because Biblefresh is supporting two translations we had to get to two communities and on Sunday that means two church services. Only, church here happens early to avoid the worst of the heat. That wasn’t going to work for us, so one pastor decided to start his service early, the other put his back until later – waiting for us to arrive before calling the congregation together.

Both services involved some level of translation, usually from French into whatever the local language was. People talk about African church services running for a long time, but out in the villages I suspect that a lot of that time is simply because you’re trying to conduct the service in a language that everyone will understand – this means speaking everything at least twice!

You know there are people here who go to church and don’t understand a word of what’s said. They rely on someone to translate it for them later when they get home. Could you imagine us doing that in the UK? – There’s probably some joke in there about preachers teaching in some foreign language even when they are speaking English, but you’re probably there before me.

Bon voyage! See you back in the UK.

A blog from Burkina

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Well, this has been a rather hectic week.

Last Friday morning I left the UK and flew to Burkina Faso with a journalist and a photographer to visit a couple of language groups in the Bissa region of the country. Two flights and a three hour car journey later, we were meeting pastors and church leaders who, as yet, preach to a congregation from a Bible in a language that most don’t understand.

All the heat and passion of an African church service is there, but with only about 10% of the population understanding French it’s a real struggle to teach. Even the pastors are saying that they have to use two or three different language versions of the Bible to get even a partial understanding of what the real meaning is.

The highlight of the trip has been visiting local people in their homes and hearing about their lives and how they have come to know God, despite the difficulties.

The stories we have heard, the video that has been shot and the photographs that have been taken, will all be shared with Christians in the UK through Biblefresh. It’s hoped that we will be able to encourage the church at home to support the church here in Burkina Faso and help the thousands of people in the Bissa region hear of God in their own language.

For me, I fly home tomorrow night in time to preach on Sunday morning in the language that I have spoken since I was a child. It really puts a whole new perspective on things.