Kouya Chronicle

I’ve just come across Ruth Hubbard’s blog. She works for the same organisation as I do and has done a much better job blogging from the conference than I have. I love this picture that I’ve stolen from her (sorry Ruth).

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die. Read More
The implications of falling church attendance in the UK for supporting world mission are rather worrying.

Jeremy Myers has posted a fascinating piece explaining how his view of his own work has changed and how this influences his choice of Bible translation.

Bible translation. (This one I can hardly believe.) As a pastor who focused primarily on preaching and teaching believers, I wanted a Bible-translation that was as close to the Greek and Hebrew as possible. Now, I want to use a Bible that is as close as possible to the language of the people I am working among. When Wycliffe goes into a community to translate the Bible, they don’t try to make a translation that is hard to read but instead, while trying to maintain accuracy, try to get a translation that is as close as possible to the vernacular. So, while I used the NASB and the NKJV, I now think I’m going to switch to the NLT. Read More

I quite like this photograph of me speaking at a Bible translation conference today. I don’t know if I look as tired as I feel. This has been a very busy two weeks and it seems a long time ago that we were on holiday. However, after today I have no more responsibilities at the conference and I can just sit and listen for the last two days. It will be good to get home.

The big screen over my shoulder is one of three showing the conference information in English, French and Spanish. Sue was part of the team making sure that the different screens stayed synchronised.

I rather liked this quote from MarkM.

Take a look at your church’s lost and found. What will the number one item there be found? Probably Bibles!

Read more

Bruce Alderman has picked up on an earlier post of mine and written a thoughtful post on how the Word of God and preaching interact. You can find it here.

I’ve already mentioned that Mike Frost will be coming to the UK in October for a speaking tour. If you want to know more, this video gives you and idea of what it’s all about.

More details from Facing the Challenge.

I gave a sermon to a large, multicultural audience composed of Bible translation leaders from all over the world. And though I say it myself, it was a great sermon, but I can’t take any credit for it as I was the interpreter not the preacher.

Daniel Bourdanne from IFES was our guest speaker and gave an excellent talk on the signs of the times from Matthew 16:1-4. It was an interesting passage to interpret for because in French it is possible to make a pun on the sign of the times (la signe du temps) and the sign of the weather (la signe du temps). It was sometimes very difficult to think through the French wordplay and have it make sense in English - I hope I did ok.

We have an amazing worship group leading our sessions. Having a guy from Burkina Faso and a Malaysian Chinese woman dancing and leading us in a Swahili song with a superb band backing them was sublime.

While on holiday I read The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World by Sanneh and Carpenter and Asian Church and World Mission by Ma and Ma. Both of these books are compiled of papers given at conferences and suffer from a lack of coherence as a result. Of the two, the Sanneh book which concentrates on Africa was the least satisfying: apart from one chapter on developing indigenous styles of worship music in the US Virgin Islands there was not much that I found new or particularly insightful. If you are a specialist in the area of African Christianity, you probably own this book already, if you are not then you probably don’t need to.

I know very little about the Church in Asia and so Wonsuk and Julie Ma’s book was a very interesting read. The papers cover issues such as pluralism, pantheism and short term mission. Many of the issues are applicable worldwide and not just to the Asian context. One particular paper, Partnersship Issues and Challenges in Asian Mission by Kham, is close to being a ‘must-read’ for mission leaders. This isn’t a book for everyone, but if you are involved in mission leadership or have a particular interest in the Asian church then you should buy it.

I believe deeply that a multiplicity of languages is one of God’s great gifts to the human race. You can hear me waxing lyrical on this subject on MP3 here (about thirty mins). However, even I think that you can have too much of a good thing and I feel very sorry for the teachers at this school in London.

One primary school – Newbury Park in east London – teaches children who speak more than 40 languages, including Tamil, Swahili, Bengali, Cantonese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian.

That has got to make life very difficult for the teachers! Read more in the Daily Telegraph.

As I mentioned a few days ago I fell off a motor scooter during our holiday in South Thailand. Well, half way through the first morning of the Bible translation conference I found that one of my bruises had become very sore and rather red and inflamed. Thinking that it might be an infection I asked a colleague who used to be a nurse which antibiotics she recommend I buy (in many parts of the world you can get such things over the counter). She took a brief look at my calf and said that I had to see a doctor immediately as she feared that what I thought was an infection could actually be a blood clot! So, I was taken down to the local hospital and kept under observation for 24 hours. I had to stay in bed for a day reading books with my leg raised. Normally, I’d be glad of the opportunity to lie in bed and read books - but I’d done a fair bit of that during the rainy phase of our holiday (though keeping a leg raised was a novelty) and anyway, the bed and food were better at the hotel where the conference is being held.

Anyway, the upshot is that I don’t have a thrombosis (though better to have checked) but I do have an infection and my leg is still sore, but the antibiotics should sort it out.

Is there a more welcome sight than your baggage arriving on the carousel? I know that purple is not a cool colour for suitcases, but at least they are easily recognised!