Monthly Archives: May 2012

Praying in Our Own Languages

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Many in Kenya’s Bibleless people groups believe their languages have no value… “A man in the Sabaot community of Western Kenya prayed aloud in his mother tongue in a gathering. Afterward, another man stood up and apologized to God for him praying in a language God wouldn’t understand; he then prayed in Swahili so God would understand.” (Read the full story.)

This is why I got so emotional when I heard Kouya being used in an international gathering! Thanks to Hannah for pointing out this article to me.

Culmination!

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Eddie Sue Icon Hug 250It was the last day of Wycliffe’s International gathering. For seven days, five hundred leaders of Bible translation organisations from over sixty five countries had met together to pray, to discuss and to seek God’s will for the future. As the conference closed, the chair called for a time of prayer and suggested that people should stand up and pray in their mother tongue. One by one, people stood up in the huge conference hall to pray. There were prayers in English, in Spanish and then a young West African stood up to pray…

Dide -Lagɔɔ. -Jejitapε, -mι na ‘paa fuo, -mι na ‘paa yuo…

I buried my face in my hands and sobbed my heart out.

The young man was Didier and he was praying in Kouya.

Didier, whom we first met in his home village of Gouabafla while he was at school, who joined the Kouya translation team in Abidjan and who committed his life to the Lord while working on John’s Gospel and who is now the director of a linguistics and translation NGO in Ivory Coast. Didier is now an honoured and respected leader in the international Bible translation movement.

Kouya, the language which people who live within thirty miles of Kouya-land have never heard of. This tiny, little known language from the Ivorian rain forest was being used to worship the Lord alongside all of the famous languages of the world. I’ve often told the story of the old Kouya man who rejoiced when he saw Kouya written down, saying that now Kouya took its place alongside English, French and German because those languages had paper, and now Kouya had paper, too. As Didier prayed, we saw that principle lived out in practice. A little bit of Revelation 7  taking place before our eyes.

Scholars generally highlight two key impacts of Bible translation. God reveals himself to people through his Word and draws them to himself and minority languages and people groups gain dignity and self worth as vehicles of the Good News. There in that conference hall in Thailand, we saw those two principles worked out in a few simple words as the Kouya people and language took their place on the world stage.

Sue and I were both involved in running that final conference session, so we weren’t sitting together, but when the meeting ended we met in the middle of the room and oblivious to everyone else (including the photographer) we wept for joy at what God had done and for the privilege of seeing Him at work.

Bible and Mission Links 19

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Bible Translation

I haven’t a clue why a piece entitled Issues of Race and Gender in Bible Translation: Interfacing with Spirituality, should  turn up on a hairdressing blog! This is a challenging paper that not all readers of Kouya Chronicle will find comfortable, but it’s good to be stretched from time to time (and, who knows, you might find inspiration for your next hairstyle!)

Davis Prickett who works in Bible Translation in Chad has posted a defence of Bible Translation based around the theme of why we shouldn’t just teach everyone English:

If a language is dying out in the next 10 or 15 years, making a translation in that tongue would be rather foolish. But thousands of minority languages are still thriving and are being passed down to the next generations, and the Word of God should be passed down as well. In fact, translating the Bible into a language may even aide in the preservation of that language.

However, I think that there is a flaw in this post and in the author’s  follow up. He flirts with the core reason why we shouldn’t just teach English, but he never quite gets there. Like many others, Prickett seems to base his reasons for mission on human need, rather than starting with the character and actions of God. The reasons Prickett gives for supporting Bible translation are all good and valid, but I don’t believe that he really gets to the heart of the issue. My thoughts on the issue are captured in this short video:

On a lighter note, the Beaker Folk illustrate the sort of problem that keeps Bible translators awake late into the night.

Missionary Practice

One of the most difficult things missionaries ever have to do is to learn a foreign language or two. After working really hard to get my French up to a reasonable standard, it was a huge discouragement to find myself right back at square one with Kouya… and Kouya was much harder than French. This post explores some of the reasons why missionaries don’t manage to learn languages.

There are no small number of missionaries today who view language study as an unpleasant necessity to be gotten done with as quickly as possible so that they can get onto the “real work” of ministry.  So they end up adopting a minimalist, instead of a maximalist approach to language study.  Instead of asking themselves, “How can I best prepare myself to be as effective as possible in ministry?”, the question becomes “How much do I absolutely need to do before I can start doing ministry?”  And if their church or mission organization only requires six months or one year of formal language study, then that is all that they do.

Another reason why missionaries (or any adults for that matter) find it difficult to learn languages is that we don’t like to make fools of ourselves in public. This post suggests that it is good for missionaries to learn to make themselves vulnerable to others. While on the notion of vulnerability, Doug asks us to please stop witnessing at people.

It is the communal and ethical life of the church which is the primary evidence Christians have to offer in support of the story they tell. The early Christians were not expected to run round grabbing passers-by and selling them a story; they were expected to live a life, and answer questions when people noticed how they lived it.

A good witness is a real person, not a religious activity.

What do you think? Does he have a point?

Reading the Bible

The Bible and Mission blog explores mission in the Gospel of Matthew, but doesn’t focus on the passages you might expect.

More recently I’ve been struck by the missional boundaries of the sermon on the mount in chs. 5-7. We would be grossly mistaken if we think, ‘Oh, that’s not about mission, it’s about discipleship’ as if the former is an external matter and the latter, internal. The sermon, an inspiring, hard, radical call to following Jesus is framed by mission, setting it in context. I want to point out three things that illustrate this:

Brian has posted three excellent articles on reading Scripture: The Power of Reading Scripture, Suggestions for A Close Reading of a Text and Skills for Reading Scripture (Contexts).  I suspect there may well be more where this came from.

Varia

Phil points to a series of videos and a discussion on the issue of wealth and poverty, while Krish has posted an interesting piece on issues facing Evangelicals today (I think he means British Evangelicals). This includes a brief discussion on what can be learned from the wider world church. It would be interesting to see this fleshed out at some point. Doug Chaplin (with yet another pithy title for his blog) posted a terrific, rather Beaker-esque, piece on Inventing the Mythical Jesus.

Let’s say we want to reform a religion in a new direction. We look for a founder who we can claim fits the kind of profile everyone is expecting. This leader, this messiah, is most likely to be a successful warrior, a general who wins battles of God’s own side. We can’t find one, so we invent a purely imaginary figure instead. Then we explain how he was a total disaster, unable to raise an army, deserted by his followers, and executed by the enemy.

One of the things that I’ve learned from blogging is that you should never criticise Christian worship music, no matter how silly or theologically inadequate the songs are. It seems as though Andrew Jones has not yet learned that lesson!

I am not usually a huge fan of contemporary worship songs. I don’t like extended chorus singing. This is the stuff of nightmares for me. I can pull off a few tunes with everyone else but then my mind wanders. Sometimes I sit down on the pew and read my Bible until the songs are over. Sometimes I scan the introduction to the hymnal, looking for historical inspiration. Or even trivia.

The reason why I come back to this theme from time to time is that I believe it is important. The songs that people sing in church has an influence in shaping the theology of the congregation. When the songs are theologically doubtful, or consist of a series of vaguely biblical thoughts or phrases strung together apparently at random, they can actively hinder people from developing a biblical world view.

Between History and the Future

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I’m not so much concerned about how the Bible came to us as I am about whether the next generation will actually read it!

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but my favourite verse in the Bible is 2 Timothy 2:2:

You have heard me teach things that have been confirmed by many reliable witnesses. Now teach these truths to other trustworthy people who will be able to pass them on to others.

Two things fascinate me about this verse. At heart I’m a teacher and trainer and the charge to pass on to others what I have learned is incredibly important and motivating to me. As someone interested in history, I’m intrigued by the way that Timothy and others kept Paul’s command. From person to person, the Gospel message was passed on from the Middle-East two thousand years ago till it reached a teenage boy in a field in Northumberland. That’s an awful lot of faithful witness! But the point of enjoying history is to learn from it.

I’m often asked to speak on the subject of how the Bible came to us. It’s a wonderful subject, full of great stories and heroism. But…

Here in the UK, we have more translations of the Bible than anyone could ever need, but we see a generation growing up (including, all to often, in the Church) who know little about it’s message. On the other hand, all round the world, there are people desperate to learn from God’s Word, who don’t have a translation available to them.

If we are to take Paul’s charge to Timothy seriously, we will have to find ways to pass the Bible on to the next generation. Those working in the UK face different issues to those of us whose focus is more international, but the basic question is still the same. How do we pass on what has been handed down to us.

Let’s thank God for those who passed the message on to us. Now, what are we going to do about it?

Mission: The Trinity 1

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The most fundamental thing we can say about God, is not that God is love or God is light (or any other simple statement from John), but rather ‘God is Trinity’. You won’t find this simple statement in the Bible, but the truth of God as three-in-one runs through the Bible and underpins everything else.

One of our problems is that we tend to think of the Trinity as a mathematical conundrum to be solved and because we can’t solve it, we tend not to think about God as Trinity very often. But we should! What the Trinity demonstrates to us is that God is a God of relationships; Father, Son and Spirit have existed eternally in a loving close communion. It is this relational nature that means we can say, ‘God is love’. If God were not Triune he could not have been love until he created an object for his love. But the Triune God has always been love and always will be love.

This loving relational nature is probably best demonstrated in John 17, where we have an amazing insight into the inner life of the Trinity as the Son pours out his hear to the Father. You walk on holy ground when you read this passage.

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,  that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. (John 17:20,21)

This is remarkable, Jesus prays about his close unity with the Father and, amazingly, prays that his church (that’s you and me) should be united in the same way that the Son and Father are united. But Jesus doesn’t stop there, he goes on to pray, ‘May they also be in us’. Jesus is praying that his followers would be united in some way with the Father and the Son. We are called to participate in the Trinitarian relationship. I have no idea how this works out, but it is an incredible privilege.

Father, Son and Spirit have existed, three-in-one, as the tightest and closest relationship that will ever be. Yet the Trinity is not exclusive. God the Son was sent to the earth to live, die and rise again so that mere creatures could be drawn into relationship with Trinity. A relational God reaches out to draw others into relationship with him.

And that is what mission is all about, following in the footsteps of our relational God to draw people into relationship with him and with us. There is no coercion, no force, just simple self-giving love.

There is an empty seat at the table in Rublev’s icon.

This is the third in a series sketching out my broad theology of mission. You can read the first post here: 

Mission: Start With God

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The rationale behind Christian mission is not that we have a task to complete, nor even the needs of people who don’t know Christ. God, his character and interaction with humanity should be the starting point of any consideration of ‘the why’ of mission.

A few days ago, I posted a sketch which captured my approach to missional theology – it is reproduced above. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try and unpack this in little chunks.

For me, the starting place for mission must always be God. I’ve covered this in a number of blog posts already (The Missional Nature of God, Mission is God’s Activity) as well as in a redacted paper from a Wycliffe discussion forum. However, I’d like to just flesh this out a little by explaining why I don’t believe that ‘our task’ or the ‘needs of the unreached’ are an adequate basis for our thinking about mission.

The Task; there is a lot written about the missionary task, fulfilling the Great Commission or one of a number of other ways of saying more or less the same thing. However, a focus on activity leads to all sorts of unanswered questions about what exactly is the task? How do we prioritise evangelism over social action? … And the list goes on. It isn’t that these questions are not important, they are – but when we start by thinking about our activity, we have no objective way of evaluating the activity.

The Need; exactly the same problem arises when we use the ‘needs of the nations’ as our starting point. If we start with people and their needs, we will be constantly forced to ask which people and which needs should be prioritised. Once again, these are important issues, but if people are our starting point, we have no way of answering questions about people’s needs. (See this post for more reflection on this question.)

Another problem with putting our work or people’s needs at the forefront of our missional reflection is that it centres things around people; rather than around God. Our mission theology and reflection needs to be theocentric, not anthropocentric.

So, our starting point for reflecting on mission must be the Triune God and his relationship to humanity and his creation. Our work finds its meaning and direction in his work and our response to human need echoes the way in which he deals with people in love and self sacrifice.

Missiological Blogs

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I’ve been asked to draw up a list of blogs which I feel are essential reading for anyone who is interested in missiology; rather than do so in an email, I decided to post my thoughts here for public consumption. The problem with a job like this is that (as I have said elsewhere) missiology is a term which gets used in so many different ways it is more or less meaningless.  So, I decided I would need some sort of criteria to define what I mean by missiology (at least in this context).

  1. These blogs are not missionary story blogs. They may sometimes tell stories, but that is not their central theme. There are plenty of good story blogs out there which will tell you about preaching in out of the way places, eating termites and such like, but that is not what I am after here.
  2. These blogs are reflective. They are written by mission practitioners who think through what it is they do and why they do it. Most of them ask some uncomfortable questions and none of them know think they know all of the answers.
  3. They are not necessarily academic blogs. Yes, some of them quote Newbiggin and Bosch, but that isn’t essential to being a good missiology blogger.
  4. All of them write in human. I don’t have the time to plough through complex blog posts which are written in jargon. Each of these writers deals with complex issues, but they do so in an accessible and interesting way.
  5. Just because I have said that these are good blogs does not mean I agree with everything they say – or even most of what they say for that matter! The point is to make you think.
  6. Not everything in these blogs is about mission or missiology; these are real people and they also write about the mundane from time to time.

Jamie the VWM. This blog might surprise you, I suspect it wouldn’t be the top of most people’s missiology list. However, Jamie’s reflections on short-term missions and her achingly beautiful meditations on her desire to see people come to know Christ are worth anyone’s reading time. Most bloggers would give their right arms to have the number of people commenting on her blog that Jamie has and this adds to the richness of her work. Some people might find the language a bit strong at times.

Every Tongue. Mark Woodward’s blog is essential reading for anyone who is interested in mission and the Bible, particularly in an African context. He just gets better and better.

Simon’s Blog. Simon Cozens is a missionary to Japan who does a great job of reflecting on his experience and commenting on wider mission issues. He is an iconoclast and not afraid of airing controversial opinions. In my view his blog should be much more widely known and commented upon.

Bible and Mission Blog. This blog, produced at Redcliffe College, tends to concentrate on quotes from the literature and reflections emerging from interactions with mission students. It is a wonderful source of links and further information.

God Directed Deviations. Another iconoclastic blog, this time with lots of good comments. It doesn’t overlap with my interests as much as the others I have mentioned, so it doesn’t turn up in my Bible and Mission Links series, however, Miguel is well worth reading and you should point your RSS reader here.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it will do for now. Please feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments section.

Magazines and Bananas

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One of my most memorable experiences working  with the Kouya people in central Ivory Coast came early on while we were trying to learn the language. I wasn’t at all prepared for the answer I got to what seemed to be a simple question. All I wanted to know was the Kouya word for ‘banana’, but I ended up with a list of seventeen different words. Apparently, even a young Kouya child could distinguish different types of banana, but to me they all just looked like bananas!

But if the Kouya had a rich banana vocabulary, when it came to ships and shipping, their store of words was decidedly lacking. When we worked on Acts 27, Paul’s shipwreck, we found ourselves really struggling to get the meaning across. For example, Kouya doesn’t have a word for ‘anchor’, …

This is the introduction for an article which I wrote for the latest Wycliffe ‘Words of Life’ magazine. You can read the full piece and lots more good stuff here.

Bible and Mission Links 18

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Church Planting

Krish Kandiah is rather excited about the prospect of Saddleback Church from the US planting a new church in London, but Matthew Phipps is somewhat more cautious and Simon Cozens is somewhat sceptical. You can make up your own mind by reading all three posts.

Bible Translation

Bible translation has been getting quite a bit of coverage in the blogsphere of late. The Anvil journal devoted a whole issue to the question. You need to register to read the full articles, but the process is easy and only takes a minute or two (so far, I’ve not received any theological spam as a result of giving Anvil my email address!). The highlights are essays by NT Wright:

Opera-goers, of course, often have the luxury of surtitles, so that while the original words are sung on stage the translation can appear on a screen above. Despite the popularity of overhead projectors in church, I have not heard anyone suggesting that we should read the Bible out loud in its original Hebrew and Greek, with a modern English translation above. The reason we don’t do that, I think, is not just the lack of competent people to read the original languages out loud. The reason is that we believe in translation. Putting the message of Jesus, and the message about Jesus, into different languages so that people can understand it in their own idiom is one of the things Christians characteristically do.

and Lamin Sanneh:

Missionaries had to cope not only with strange, unfamiliar sounds and usage, but also with nuance and allusions in languages for which they had to develop, almost literally, new ears. We know from missionary correspondence what a crushing burden this puts on the shoulders of even the most able and willing, and how long and arduous is the effort to make headway.

Mark Woodward has an interesting post on the value of linguistic diversity from a Christian point of view.

In this light I believe a Christian response is to come alongside communities whose languages are threatened by extinction and offer our help in preserving and developing these languages, thereby allowing often struggling communities to thrive, affirming their identity, self-worth and their place in God’s world. This may not always be seen to be cost-effective or an efficient use of resources, but I think it is a practical outworking of God’s kingdom in an increasingly globalised world that is happy to see minority languages fall by the wayside. The alternative, to accept uniformity as necessary for the sake of convenience and “progress”, is merely to repeat the mistake of the builders at Babel, who sought to stay together and try to achieve something significant apart from God, rather than fulfilling God’s mandate to go, fill and steward his diverse creation.

On the subject of English Bibles, there has been a lot of hysteria about a new translation called The Voice (not to be confused with a TV show of the same name). Ben Witherington has reposted some comments on the whole thing:

In the new translation called The Voice Bible (Thomas Nelson Publishers), the choice was made to go for a more dynamic translation of some familiar words. The one that seems to have got some folks all worked up is the translation of the Greek word Christos as “the anointed one”. Hysterical people and some news outlets scream: “New translation takes Christ out of the Bible!” So, e.g., the lead scholar in the project, Dr. David Capes (Houston Baptist University), gets interviewed on CNN about why they’ve done this, and across blog-dom the hysterics spread.

So, for the record: CNN and USAToday have misrepresented the translation. Nobody’s removed Jesus from the NT. The translation “anointed” is simply what “Christos means. It’s not a name, of course, but a title.

Not all discussions of Bible translation are heated or uninformed. Simple discipleship has a great little post about the difficulty of translating the word doulos in the context of an ethnically mixed congregation in the USA. It is a superb illustration of the sort of minefield that translators are continually forced to navigate.

On the subject of minefields, the World Evangelical Alliance have announced the chairman of the panel who will be carrying out a review of Wycliffe’s translation policies.

Various Mission Issues

We have always enjoyed good relations with our supporting churches. However, this cautionary tale shows that not all missionaries can say the same thing.

Simon has posted an interesting piece on the danger of doing.

… events are the false god of missionary work. And yeah, that’s strong terminology but I’m going with it because I think there is something very seductive and very dangerous—at least for me, I’m speaking here about what pushes my particular egotistical buttons—about the idea that I can put on an event, lots of people come, and hey presto, my missionary work is worthwhile. I’m doing something, and better than that, I made it happen. People came to a thing I made.
This is complimented by a challenging piece from my friend Ruedi on Measuring God’s Performance.

In Christian circles, it has become fashionable to measure impact and results rather than activities. Yet, the apostle Paul wrote that some plant and some water, but God gives growth. When we try to measure results, we ultimately attempt to measure God’s performance. Which, to say the least, seems just a tad presumptuous… The biblical response for us, as it was for King David, is not only to cease and desist from a measuring behavior, but to repent of the desire to measure in the first place.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on that one!

And Lastly…

Doug posted a wonderful article on inventing the mythical Jesus, which needs to be read in its entirety, so I won’t try and quote it. We’ve had a lot of dismal weather in the UK over the last couple of months, thankfully, the Beaker Folk have found the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Best Kept Secret

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Does it frustrate you to see so many English language versions of the Bible when some languages don’t have one?

It drives me up the wall quite frankly. When I saw they were revising the NIV yet again, I found it quite difficult.

That being said, many of the translators do use their profits to support Christian ministry around the world. So the people who publish the Living Bible are very generous benefactors to Wycliffe.

I can’t complain entirely, but I do wish we’d stop lavishing resources on ourselves and offer resources to the rest of the world. It’s the spiritual equivalent of obesity being a huge problem in the Western world while there are millions around the world who are starving.

This is an excerpt from an interview with me conducted by Sam Hailes of Christianity.co.uk.