⁹“This, then, is how you should pray:
” ‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
¹⁰your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
¹¹Give us today our daily bread.
¹²Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
¹³And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.

One thing that I’m still pondering is the fact that the words of this prayer imply community. Nowhere are we taught to pray for, ‘my daily bread’, or to, ‘deliver me from the evil one’. Instead it’s our or us; we should be praying this for others as well as for ourselves.

What do you think?

Mr Blenkinsop is quoted as saying, ‘The changes pave the way for schools to teach creationism’.

Why is creationism trotted out every time there’s any hint of religion playing a part in education. If every child, from tomorrow, was taught that the world came about as a result of creation and not a cosmic event, what would the result be? The origins of the world play a very small part in a child’s education. Any religious education would have very little impact on maths classes or PE. Religious education should, I’d hope, still involve an understanding of different world religions, French and German would still be the same languages, English would still require the reading of classic books and an understanding of grammar.

What should worry us more is that children are being taught that the world came into existence by some kind of cosmic event with no thought given to other theories. Even world class research scientists wouldn’t discount the possibility that there is something more behind the dawning of our universe than just a collision of particles.

See more videos in this series from God: New Evidence

Godly Living – Titus 2:11-15

Photograph from Ruth Hubbard's blog http://ruthhubbard.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/gloria-a-dios/

Ruth Hubbard is Vice-President of Communications for Wycliffe Bible Translators in the US. Recently she was in Guatemala, where Cameron Townsend – the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators – first recognised the need for Bible translation.

In a recent blog post Ruth reflected on how things have changed.

• When Cameron Townsend started work he thought that there were about 1,000 languages in the world. It turns out that there are around 7,000.
• In Guatemala it’s possible to see the results of the early days of Bible translation. Not only are there Christians as a result of the Bibles that were produced in the minority languages, but, these Christians are involved in leadership within the church.

Uncle Cam (that’s what some call him) had a vision that was both expansive and limited. He saw a day when people from every language community would have access to God’s Word and therefore could decide for themselves whether to enter into a relationship with Him or reject that invitation. That vision is in the process of being fulfilled. Today there are just over 2,000 language communities with no access to Scripture who need it, and around 2,000 with a translation in progress.

You can read the whole piece on Ruth’s blog Hubbard’s Cupboard

It just got me wondering, what do we take for granted today that within 80 years will have changed completely?

Bible translation in Mozambique from Wycliffe International on Vimeo.

My job for the day had been to take photographs, but it’s quite difficult to concentrate on this as the character of Jesus is being crucified before me.

A few weeks previously I had been to interview Bec Rogers, one of the Saltmine actors and the director of the production. She had commented that for her she learnt a lot through seeing the Bible, rather than reading words on a page. Bec has Dyslexia, which means that taking written information in is difficult for her. Seeing the Bible story enabled her to make a much stronger connection with what was going on.

From Eden to Eternity is on tour in May and June, the dates are below.

From Eden To Eternity – 2010 Tour Venues

• 11th May – Exeter – Belmont Chapel
• 12th May – Bristol – Kensington Baptist
• 13th May – Swansea – City Temple
• 14th May – Cardiff – Highfields Church
• 15th May – Hereford – Hereford Baptist Church
• 18th May – Northampton – Kingdom Life Church
• 19th May – Cambridge – St Barnabas Church
• 20th May – Ipswich – St John the Baptist
• 21st May – Norwich – Norwich Central Baptist Church
• 22nd May – Banbury – St Paul’s Church
• 25th May – Durham – St Nicholas Church
• 27th May – Sunderland – Sunderland Minster

• 8th June – Shrewsbury – Trinity Churches, Holy Trinity Meole Brace
• 9th June – Thame – St Mary’s Church
• 10th June – Fleet – Church on the Heath
• 11th June – Brentwood – Peniel Church
• 12th June – Leeds – City Evangelical Church
• 15th June – Coventry – Elim Pentecostal Church
• 16th June – Woking – Christ Church
• 17th June – Ruislip – Ruislip Baptist Church
• 18th June – Brighton/Hove – Holland Road Baptist Church
• 19th June – Crawley – Crawley Baptist Church
• 21st June – Chelmsford – Central Baptist Church
• 22nd June – Chertsey – St Peters Church
• 23rd June – Portsmouth – Oasis Church, The Venue
• 24th June – Salisbury – St Pauls Church
• 25th June – Swindon – Freshbrook Evangelical Church

The King James Version gives us…

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

The New International Version

in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

Out of the 20 English versions available through Bible Gateway only five give an alternative to the phrase twinkling of an eye. We were just wondering if this is the best translation of the original Greek text, or whether it’s something that just works for the English and that a different turn of phrase was in the original.

Philip Hewer recently wrote about the challenges of translating Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, and in its original form, a masterpiece of poetry.

The Hebrew uses 8 different terms in referring to the Word of God, e.g. law, testimony, ordinance/judgment, commandment, statutes, precepts, word, promise/word. However, the Psalmist’s choice from among these terms is largely governed by the demands of the poetic structure, rather than focusing on a particular facet of meaning in each instance. The 176 verses are divided into 22 stanzas (strophes) of 8 lines each, and within each stanza each of the 8 lines starts with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, working through all 22 letters successively. Wow! Can you imagine the Psalmist composing within those restrictions?

Read the full post here

Philip Hewer is a colleague of mine at Wycliffe Bible Translators. He’s currently embroiled in checking Old Testament text for a Bible translation in Ghana. You can read about his work on his blog, Hewers of Wood.

1 – Asking the wrong questions.

On Sunday I asked about church, what people think about it, what the concerns are and how they viewed the service. But, here, in Burkina Faso, these are non-questions. People that go to church aren’t concerned with the volume of the music, whether they sit in chairs or on pews, or how long the minister speaks for. Standing outside the church you aren’t met with a barrage of opinion in the same way you would be outside a church in the West. Church is much more about the life of the community than personal opinion.

In many ways this is a regular feature of life in Africa. The kinds of things we would see as problems in the West just aren’t relevant here, and we’re not going to discover the real issues until we learn what the questions are that we should be asking.

2 – The medium is the message, and this applies to language too.

There are three levels of language in Burkina Faso. French, the national language, used for national trade, politics and by tourists buying African shirts (yes, I’ve just got one).

Then there are two national languages which would be used by nationals for trade. These languages would be used at the markets and when travelling around the country. They mean that, even those individuals that don’t have a high level of education, are able to travel and work within communities.

Finally, there’s the language of the community. What’s spoken in the village and in the home.

In somewhere like Burkina Faso the Bible is already available in French and the two national languages. The educated can read and understand French and many nationals can work in one of the two national languages. But, the unwritten message associated with this is (French) you have to be educated to know God, or (two national languages) a relationship with God is based around trade.

It’s the language of the home that deals with feelings and emotions, how you conduct your life and how you relate to people. That’s why it’s so important that the Bible is available in the languages of these communities. Knowing God is about being in a relationship with him, not about being educated in the right things or conducting some kind of business meeting, to express this fully it’s essential to do it in the language that is used by people for these kinds of conversations.

As a bit of a footnote I’ve just read some comments from Onesimus Online (HT: Mark) who illustrates the differences in African and Western cultures when it comes to issues of faith and belief.

So thorough is the westernization of my African students that they don’t seem to notice that all of their education, all of their theology, all of their assumptions, can be traced to the efforts of well-meaning western missionaries. These missionaries came (and sometimes still come) with an assumed posture of superiority, namely that they are here to ‘help’ these Africans escape their darkness and get saved like us. Salvation too often means getting Africans to accept that our problems are their problems and that our solutions must be their solutions. For example, most Western missionaries assume that Christ has come to save us from our legal problem before a holy God; namely, that our sin makes us guilty before God and deserving of his condemnation and wrath. Christ resolves our problem by becoming our sin on the cross, bearing our punishment and thus freeing us from the penalty of the law. We are no longer under condemnation, but are accepted into fellowship with God, with the end result that we will go to heaven and not to hell.

This is standard fare for Western Evangelicals and their predecessors. And while a solid case may be made from the New Testament that this is indeed an aspect of our salvation, our polemical stance against the perceived ‘works righteousness’ of Roman Catholics has meant that this becomes increasingly, by over-emphasis, the only aspect of our salvation, or certainly the most important, and certainly what is preached from Sunday to Sunday.

The problem is that Africans on their own don’t perceive that their main problem before God is their compromised legal status. So in order to get them to understand ‘the gospel’ – or at least our Western understanding of the gospel – we missionaries must first teach them about God’s law and what sin is and what Christ has done to satisfy God’s law. Once they understand these things, then they are in a position to ‘accept Christ as their personal Savior’ and be forgiven. To this end, evangelists urge congregations to respond to the ‘free’ grace of God in Christ so that their sins may be forgiven and they be reconciled to God.

Again, this sounds so normal to our Western Evangelical ears that we may be immediately suspicious of anyone that seems to have a problem with it. But as mentioned above, most of my African friends don’t first and foremost worry about their legal standing before God. Rather, they are far more concerned about demons which seem to afflict every aspect of their lives, they are concerned about people who manipulate spiritual power for good and ill in other people’s lives, they are concerned about sicknesses and barrenness, for which there seems to be no cure, they are concerned about capricious weather that makes their crops fail and their cattle die and causes them to go hungry, and they are concerned about death. The tremendous irony that I observe is that our Western gospel has come full force into Kenya (and many other African countries) through the ministries of thousands of Western missionaries, resulting in the majority of people here and in a number of other countries professing faith in Christ and testifying to having been born again. And yet this gospel does not touch those aspects of their lives that reflect their deepest needs and most profound concerns.

Read more here