Tag Archives: languages

Books I Have Read: Found In Translation

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One of the great delights in life is reading a book by someone who really loves what they do and who communicates it well. Over the years I’ve read some fascinating books on subjects as far apart as quantum mechanics and molecular virology. Popular science writing is hard to do, but when it is done well, it is wonderful.

Found in Translation by Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche is a superb example of a book written by practitioners who have a gift for explaning their subject. It is informative without being heavy, funny without being flippant; and as much as a non-fiction book can be a page-turner, this one manages to be one.

In my line of work, translation tends simply to mean Bible translation, but this book covers a whole gamut of fascinating fields of translation beyond that of Holy Writ. I have sometimes wondered how sports stars manage to ply their trade in a country where they don’t speak the language – now I know. It would be futile to try and list all of the aspects of translation that are covered in this book, so I won’t try. However, if you like words and you are looking for something good to read on the beach this summer; this should be in your bag (especially if you are involved in Bible translation).

Just a couple of remarks in passing. It was gratifying to read a whole book on translation that never once mentioned dynamic or formal equivalence, These terms which are so often debated on Bible translation blogs (including, sometimes, this one) are simply not a part of the everyday translation lexicon.

One sad omission from the section on literary translation were the two finest translators of great literature; Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, the English translators of the Asterix books. Other opinions on great translators are available – they are just wrong!

I should mention that one of the authors of Found in Translation kindly sent me a copy; however, I’d have been just as positive about it if I’d paid for it myself. It really is an excellent book.

Good Translation: Bad Translation

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I’m currently thoroughly enjoying Found in Translation by Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche. It is a fascinating and amusing overview of the world of translation. I’ll give a fuller review when I finish it. Those who are interested in Bible translation will be immediately struck by the fact that the authors never talk about ‘dynamic equivalence’, ‘formal translation’ or any of those other terms which creep in whenever Bible translation is mentioned. These categories, so beloved of Bible translation polemicists, are simply not used in the wider world of translation.

In a recent blog post, Simon Cozens picks up on this theme.

And this is what bothers me about the whole discussion over Bible translation. People have got more concerned about literal versus dynamic, word-for-word versus thought-for-thought, and so on that they forget that when it comes to translation, there’s really only one dimension that matters: is it a good translation or a bad translation? It’s possible to do a literal translation really well, especially in languages that are genetically similar. And this is where I think English speakers are at a disadvantage thinking about translation, because their first experiences of translation tend to be of languages like French or Spanish which have similar modes of expression to English, and therefore they’re tricked into thinking that literal translation is necessarily a good idea. But where a target language has a very different mode of expression from the source, for instance when translating from Japanese to English, or from Hebrew to English, literal translation generally ends up being bad translation.

Make sure you read Simon’s full post, it’s well worth it.

Some of our Ancient Personal History

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In the early 1980s, Sue and I felt that God was calling us into mission work in a French speaking country. For us, this naturally meant something, somewhere in Europe; Bible translation in Africa was the last thing on our minds. Over a period of many months we sought advice from the leaders of our church and other people we respected. We wrote to a number of different missionary organisations who worked in Europe and had a couple of interviews; but nothing seemed to work. It was all rather frustrating. Around this time, some friends suggested that we should visit Wycliffe Bible translators to see what they could offer us. To be honest, I thought this was a crazy idea, but Sue, who is a linguist by training, was quite attracted by the thought – so we went along. Over the space of one weekend, God turned our lives around completely. It turned out that my background as a research scientist was just as useful for a Bible translator as Sue’s linguistic ability. Not only that, but Wycliffe had urgent need for people to work in French speaking Africa. All of the pieces fell into place; our calling to a French speaking country and our academic background suddenly made perfect sense. Thankfully, our Church leadership thought the same thing.

A little over four years after our first contact with Wycliffe, equipped with some of the best practical linguistics training in the world, we moved into a Kouya village in Ivory Coast, West Africa. The Kouya are a hardy, strongly independent people who live in twelve villages on the edge of a dense rain forest. At the time we settled into the village of Gouabafla, there was a handful of Christians in each of the Kouya villages, though the vast majority of them had been believers for less than five years. We became part of a first generation church; it was like living in the book of Acts!

The Kouya area is home to a number of different people groups, but non-Kouyas seem to find it almost impossible to learn to speak Kouya. Because of this, most Kouyas speak at least three or four other African languages fluently in addition to French, which they learn at school. It is hardly surprising that when we turned up in the village and said that we were going to learn to speak Kouya, that people were extremely sceptical. If Africans who had grown up in the area didn’t manage to learn it, how could a couple of white, outsiders expect to.

A rather younger Sue and Eddie: Ivory Coast December 1992

I’ve never done anything as difficult in my life. Intellectually, getting my head around a whole new way of thinking and a completly new vocabulary was a huge challenge, but it was the least of my problems. The really difficult thing was going out every day to talk to people knowing that I was making a complete and utter fool of myself. It really isn’t easy being laughed at every day. What’s worse, I found myself thinking some rather unpleasant things. “How dare they laugh at me? I’ve left my nice comfortable home in England to come and help them – they should be grateful.” “Do they realise who they are laughing at? I’ve got a university degree and tons of other qualifications, they are just cocoa farmers.” I’d come to share Jesus with the Kouya, but there were times when my attitudes and thoughts were miles from where Jesus would have wanted them to be. But this is the heart of The Story; God loves men and women so much that he wants them to communicate on his behalf, despite the fact that people are far from perfect. Like all of God’s people, I have a whole series of weaknesses and failings; which makes it all the more bizarre that I would look down on anyone!

It took two years of hard work before we became at all comfortable speaking Kouya, and even then it remained a huge struggle to say things in a way that people would understand what we were going on about. But there is nothing in the world to compare to the thrill of being accepted into a community that is completely different to your own. We used to love the expression on people’s faces when they would realise that we were speaking Kouya rather than French. Complete strangers would stop in market and say “aya, the world has changed, the toubabs (white people) are speaking Kouya”. We became something of a tourist attraction in our village. When family members or friends came from elsewhere in the region, they would be brought to our house to meet the tame Europeans who could speak Kouya. It was hilarious! Mind you, not every one was pleased to see us. There were some people who were very suspicious of our motives. Some thought we were spies and more than one person asked where we kept our radio that we used to report back to our government in Washington: it was hard not to laugh at that one. Others thought that we had come to write a book about the Kouya language that we could sell for a fortune back in our home country. At first we were very defensive about these sorts of accusations, but as we learned more about the Kouya and about the colonial history of the country, we realised that the Kouya had good reason to be suspicious of the motives of Europeans. History wasn’t really on our side. Despite the suspicions that some people harboured, most people were delighted to see us in their village. . The Kouya loved it that people from outside were making the effort to speak their language. They were used to outsiders not even bothering to master the basics, but here was a couple who had come all the way from Europe and who were chatting away in the language. Our being there gave them a sense of value and self-worth. Kouya people would tell us that their language was not a real language  like French; it couldn’t be written down and it didn’t have a grammar. Over time, we were able to help the Kouya to write their language down and we could show them that it didn’t just have a grammar but it had a very complex and elegant grammar that was often far richer than the French they learned at school. They loved that!

It took a further twelve years and input from a team of Kouya and Europeans before the Kouya New Testament was finally ready to be published. During that time, we saw the small church grow in numbers and maturity. I’m not sure how much impact we had personally in the process and I’m absolutely convinced that we learned more from our Kouya brothers and sisters than they learned from us. But there is one thing that was clearly communicated to the Kouya through our presence in their village: God cares for them. They may be a small ethnic group, more or less ignored or unknown by the larger groups around them: but God sent his servants to live amongst them and God speaks their language. I loved it when an elderly Kouya said to me that the Kouya were just as important as the Americans, French or Germans, because God spoke their language, just the same as he did for those others.

Language Culture and the Benefits of Bible Translation

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Three years ago, I wrote a longish blog post (part of a chapter of my unfinished book) which included the following…

Just as each culture brings something new to humanity, so does every language. Each language is capable of expressing some things better than all other languages. Why else to coffee shops sell cafe latte rather than milky coffee? On a deeper note, each language has the ability to express itself in ways that other languages can’t quite manage. There are subtleties of meaning and inference that just can’t quite be transferred from one language to another without losing something. And this is really important, because that means that each language can say things about God and is capable of praising God in ways that other languages can’t quite reach. When God multiplied the languages at Babel, He also gave us the possibility of understanding Him and praising Him in new ways. Babel was a judgement, but at the same time God blessed humanity immeasurably and revealed even more of us to himself.

A recent article in Christianity Today by Jost Zetzsche covers similar ground, but takes things a step further than I did. Jost suggests that the wealth of translations available to us today gives us a breadth of insight that can’t be achieved through reading the text in the original languages.

Every new rendering of God’s Word in a linguistic set of human expression—a language—enriches the worldwide church in her understanding of God, regardless of whether we speak that particular language. Our thinking and imagination are necessarily confined and constrained by our own language and its assumptions. But when we encounter another language—and as it confronts and interacts with the biblical text—it can expand our understanding of God and our world. This is true in our dealings with the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic source texts, yes, but also the more than 2,000 target languages into which the Bible or parts of the Bible have been translated.

Take this example from a number of Chinese Bible translations. We know that God transcends gender, but most languages are limited to grammatical gender expressed in pronouns. In the case of English, this is confined to he, she, and it. Modern Chinese, however, offers another possibility. In modern Chinese, the third-person singular pronoun is always pronounced the same (tā), but it is written differently according to its gender (他 is he, 她 is she, and 它/牠 is it). In each of these characters, the first (or upper) part defines the gender (man, woman, or thing/animal), while the second element gives the clue to its pronunciation.
In 1930, after a full century with dozens of Chinese translations, Bible translator Wang Yuande coined a new “godly” pronoun: 祂. Chinese readers immediately knew how to pronounce it: tā. But they also recognized that the first part of that character, signifying something spiritual, clarified that God has no gender aside from being God. This translation discovery was an aha moment for Chinese believers. But knowing this benefits us as well—even if we don’t understand Chinese—because it expands our comprehension of God’s divine character.

There is no automation in this process. Translation is not a magical act where a unique facet of God is unearthed each time a new translation is published or a language is “conquered.” But as each faith community matures, discoveries like the Chinese divine pronoun can add to our understanding of God. In the case of the Chinese pronoun, it took a maturation process of 100 years and a member of the native church to reach this revelation.

Mission scholar Andrew Walls says similar things in parts of his work and the IVP Dictionary of Mission Theology article on language, linguistics and translation says the following (p. 201)

This means that divine revelation is much larger and richer than the capacity of any finite language to contain it. Consequently when the biblical message is translated into another language, whatever loss is incurred in subtle shades of meaning is always compensated by gains in fresh theological insights.

The implication of all of this is that translation is a part of God’s ongoing self-revelation to humanity and not simply a pragmatic add-on to solve the problem of incomprehension.

Whatever you think of these ideas, you should read the original article in Christianity Today and have your thinking challenged.

Languages In Nigeria

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Next month, I’m travelling out to Nigeria, where I will be speaking at a retreat for my colleagues out there. It was a nice encouragement to read this peace in the Nigeria Guardian which is very complimentary about Wycliffe’s work there:

FEBRUARY 21, the International Mother Language Day, provided an opportunity to take a critical look at our languages as Nigerians. Because of the second fiddle nature Nigerian languages have assumed in our own society, it is pertinent to ask: Who is Killing Nigerian languages — foreigners or the language owners?

Incidentally, Nigerian languages have enjoyed a wide range of support from the Occident, the U.S in particular. One such support is from Wycliffe, a US-based organisation — established since 1942 to translate the Bible into every language spoken in the world. Giant strides have been made by the organisation as it has completed 700 translations. Currently, it supports languages spoken in 90 countries, including Nigeria. In keeping with its vision, Wycliffe has deployed human, financial, special-designed software and other resources to build orthographies for hitherto non-written languages, educate native speakers to read and write their languages, build glossaries in these languages while preserving the histories and cultures of language owners, etc. Unknown minority languages spoken by 10,000 and 1,000,000 speakers now have written documents, thus preventing the languages from extinction.

Pertaining to Nigeria, some ongoing and finished bible translations, which are due to the effort of the Wycliffe teams and native speakers of the languages include: Ezaa, Ikwo and Izii languages of the Abakaliki cluster (spoken in Ebonyi State: Abakaliki, Ezza, Ohaozara, and Ishielu LGAs); Benue State: Okpokwu LGA), Alago (a first language spoken in Nassarawa State: Awe and Lafia LGAs), Dadiya (a first language spoken in Gombe State: Balanga LGA; Taraba State: Karim Lamido LGA and Adamawa state: Numan LGA, Huba (a first language spoken in Adamawa state: Hong, Maiha, Gombi, and Mubi LGAs), Hyam (a first language spoken in Kaduna: Kachia and Jema’s LGAs), Ichen or Etkywan (a first language spoken in Taraba State: Takum, Sardauna, Bali, and part of Wukari LGAs).

Speaking of Nigeria, it’s nice to have the excuse to show this excellent photo of Sue doing some translation consultancy work there, a few years ago.

Sue consulting Nigeria

Voices United for Mali

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When you get artists from across a country as culturally diverse as Mali producing a song, you end up with a wonderful mixture of languages and cultural styles. In this superb video there is singing and rapping in Bambara, Sonniké, Songhai, Tamasheq and even a little French.

This is the Mali I love; colourful, welcoming and amazingly musical.

Bruce does a great job of unpacking the lyrics to this song – it isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems at first.

I Speak Bible

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One of the occupational hazards of life as a Bible translator is having to answer well meaning people when they ask how many languages you speak. In my experience, people are generally disappointed when they realise I don’t actually speak that many. My French is very good, I can just about get by in Kouya and that’s just about it. Bible translators generally don’t have time to learn lots of languages; translation is hard work and takes lots of time.

This excellent article from the commercial translation world illustrates this point beautifully:

We translators can spend decades of rigorous effort in the lead-up to our translation careers – and certainly during such careers – developing the crucial subject-matter expertise essential to the translation enterprise.

This process involves learning highly complex concepts in science, technology, philosophy, law, finance, business, music and dozens of other fields through immersion in the lab, lecture hall, classroom, production line, fabrication plant, trading floor or boardroom.

This prolonged effort is crucial to our ability to precisely convey all these concepts across language barriers.

But no matter how many fields we master as translators, awaiting us at that same cocktail party will be the eternal question that has been asked of translators since the Tower of Babel:

“How many languages do you speak?”

It’s a question that suggests an innocent, almost whimsical notion of translation as a low-stress career of light reflection, picked up effortlessly while flipping through phrase books and sipping sweet tea in the afternoon shade.

The reality is rather more sobering. In my case, for example, I’d arrive at such parties after having worked out certain issues in my translation work such as the principles underlying optical excitation of Rayleigh waves by interband light absorption or coherent acoustic resistance to an electron-hole plasma or approaches to calculating the electronic structure of alloys.

So my response to this friendly question of “how many languages do you speak?” would be a bit playful and would always be delivered with a smile:

“I speak science.”

The challenge for the Bible translator is not so much to learn lots of exciting, exotic languages, but to get to grips with the text of the Bible so well that they are able to render it accurately and fluently into a new language. First and foremost, Bible translators must speak BIble.

Thanks to Ed Lauber for drawing my attention to this article on Twitter

Some Thoughts About Power

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A few weeks ago, I quoted from a piece by Simon Cozens in which he said:

And while we love to talk about leadership in churches and in mission, we really don’t like to talk about power. Jesus’ whole life and death was a demonstration that the power of God is made perfect in weakness. The Devil tempted him to accomplish his mission through asserting power, and he resisted. And yet how often in mission do we succumb to the same temptation.

To get the full sense of this quote in context, you should read the whole article, but I don’t want to cut and paste the whole thing here. Simon’s observations struck a chord with me and over the next couple of weeks, I’d like to explore the role of power in missionary work. These first few thoughts are drawn directly from an essay I wrote six or seven years ago, which you can download if you want to:

In non-denominational settings the voice of the Southern Church is being heard more often. According to Lee international mission conferences were predominantly Western until the Lausanne meeting in 1974, but since Lausanne the mixture of participants has been much more equitable. However, while there may be a good representation of Southerners in International gatherings, it is still Westerners who dominate the discussions. 

It is my experience that many international gatherings have a good representation of  Southerners (though their numbers often do not reflect the reality of the World Church). however, Southerners are often placed at a linguistic and cultural disadvantage. The dominance of English as an international medium makes it more difficult for non-English speakers to participate in discussion and debate. Also, open discussion and argument on a conference floor is a very Western way of achieving group consensus, but is not very comfortable to many Asians and Africans who prefer more indirect methods of achieving the same aim.

Southern Churches are slowly but surely increasing their influence in World Christianity. However, it is still true that the most influential Churches and individuals tend to be
based in the West. This is partly due to historic reasons but also due to the fact that
though the Western Churches may be declining, they are still rooted in the richest and
generally the most powerful societies in the world. This gives the Western Churches a degree of economic power and influence within the Christian communion which is out of
all proportion to their true size.

Interestingly, my final reflection on Lausanne III in Cape Town picked up on this same theme:

I have already highlighted the way in which all of the conference presentations had to be given in English.  The conference chairman explained that this was done to facilitate the interpretation into other languages. While this was an issue, it was not an insurmountable one. Having everyone speak in English marginalised all other language  communities and reduced them to a lower status, which was unfortunate. It was desperately sad to see people struggle to read statements in English and coming across as dull and boring, when they would undoubtedly have been exciting and interesting in their own language. On the last morning we were reminded that we have to listen to the voices from the margins of the Church – sadly, the message of the conference was that we would only listen to the margins if they speak English.

Bible and Mission Links 21

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It’s been a while since my last update of all things Bible and mission floating around the internet, so there is a fair bit to mention this time round.

Bible Translation

Coming from a secularised western society, I find it difficult to get my mind around concepts such as witchcraft and sorcery. However, this is something that Bible translators cannot ignore; the Bible has a fair bit to say on the subject and many languages have very complex ways of addressing it. The complexity of this issue is a great illustration of the  simple fact that not just anyone can be a Bible translator. The Huffington Post has an interesting background piece on myths about translation.

English Bibles

Tim asks the not unreasonable question of why we need so many versions of the Bible in English while Joel asks how our favourite Bible translations measure up. I am constantly amazed at the new and rather odd editions of the Bible which are produced in the US. If this review is at all accurate, I won’t be hurrying out to buy a copy of the Founders’ Bible at any time soon, but I might be tempted to buy a copy of the Mission of God Study Bible.

βλογάπη (great name for a website) has a fascinating link to a piece which evaluates the historical impact of the KJV.

Cross-Cultural Mission

Mark Woodward picked up on my links to Mark Meynel’s blog (the Two Marks of Mission?) and wrote an excellent piece which is well worth quoting:

What would it mean for us to make strategic decisions based on a study of God’s mission throughout the Bible? Or what Jesus had to say about poverty and wealth? As we are working across cultures and in multi-ethnic teams, what can we learn from Paul’s New Testament letters as he continually battles with a multi-racial church, with vastly different cultures, histories and traditional beliefs, that he insists has been united in Christ? How might we plan our work in a post-colonial and globalised world in light of the Bible’s interaction with the major themes of empire and oppression? Or slavery and (both geographical and spiritual) exile? How might the biblical approaches to suffering and persecution inform our decisions? Or the experiences of communities in the Bible as they live as ethnic minorities, with their culture and identity under threat from every side? What can we learn from Jesus about how to announce a kingdom that is putting everything right, but starts out as a small seed that falls to the ground?

I think at times we can be afraid to discuss these things in a corporate setting (particularly those of us working in an inter-denominational environment), as we are afraid to disagree. But again I think this fear stems from the modern insistence that there is only one right answer, and that we must decide on it together. Maybe the truth is that it’s only actually as diverse but united believers, wrestling with these huge issues and humbly stepping forward in faith, that we begin to draw closer to God and appreciate more of what he is doing in his world.

Jonathan Martin writes about a controversy which has convulsed parts of the American Christian blogsphere, but does so from a perspective of the world Church. What he has to say puts a lot of our current theological questions into perspective:

The average Christian in the world right now is an African or Latin American female in her early 20’s.  She doesn’t read our blogs and she doesn’t readChristianity Today.  She doesn’t know or care who I am and she never will.  The names Piper, Driscoll, Chan, Bell, Stanley, Warren—mean nothing to her.  Like most Pentecostal women coming into the kingdom around the world, words like “complementarian” and “egalitarian” are not in her vocabulary, nor Calvinism and Arminianism.  Unlike some of my brothers would lead you believe (where their lunch table is the only one that cares about Scripture and THE GOSPEL while anybody who believes differently from them in these tired conversations are flaming liberals), she takes the authority of the Bible very seriously.  But more importantly, she believes in the power of the Bible in ways that are incomprehensible even for our most rabid “conservatives.”  The western filter and language that frames these issues will not be determinative for her, unlucky as she is not to read our blogs.  She may well in end up leading a church one day where she preaches Jesus like a woman on fire and lays hands on the sick and watches God heal them, though this will surprise those Reformed colleagues who are sure all female church leaders have been trained by godless-Unitarian-lesbian-leftist-radical feminist-seminarians (she didn’t have access to seminary at all–unfortunately she has read the Acts of the Apostles).  Who knew?

The world has moved on, God has moved on, and we didn’t even notice.

Resources

There is a fascinating pieceon the Affinity website about reaching post-modern youth who come from an Eastern-Orthodox background. Thanks to Tim for pointing out that  Thomas Shcirrmacher’s collection of essays,  World Mission: Heart of Christianity, is available as a free pdf download. I’ve only just started reading this, but it seems very good so far. Ben has linked to some fascinating maps which look at the way in which religious believers have migrated around the world and Mez has reviewed one of the best books I know on Christian social involvement.

Varia

The Beaker Folk have posted an excellent guide to evaluating mission initiatives:

From the Beaker FOlk

 While the Opinionated Vicar has a great illustration of discipleship:

Bible and Mission Links 20

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For those who follow these things, I have changed the sea bird photograph that I’m using for this series. There is no significance behind the change or my choice of photo, but I though I’d mention it.

Over the last few weeks Antony Billington has been blogging up a storm and has linked to lots of good resources including:

Bible Translation

There have been a few recent blog posts setting out reasons why Bible translation is important for the Church.

The Seed Company blog has a good article setting out a justification for Bible translation. Itbuilds on the work of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls. Regular readers of Kouya Chronicle will have seen much of this before, but as a summary of some current thinking it is worth a look:

Joel Hoffman has written a fascinating little post on the problem of translating directions in the Bible. Who would have imagined that a simple word like ‘south’ could be so problematic?

There are lots of blog posts written about theories and models of Bible translation, most of which are not written by translators – and it shows. As a general rule, if anyone writes something along these lines “there are two main theories of Bible translation; dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence”, they almost certainly don’t know what they are talking about! If you want to get a good overview of the various ideas about Bible translation and you would like to place them in some sort of context, this article would be a good place to start. (HT katadrew)

Nathan has written an excellent article on the problem of choosing the best Bible translation in English.

 This is unacceptable. The English language has plenty of translations to choose from. There shouldn’t be the thought of another translation project in our language until we cut the number of languages with no Bibles in half! And even then it probably wouldn’t be necessary to start another English language translation project. It’s amazing that the KJV has lasted so long with its thees and thous. People still use the KJV as their translation of choice. If the KJV could last so long, couldn’t our modern translations like the NIV or the HCSB tide us over for a while so that we can get as many resources over to these other countries that have nothing?

This piece asks some hard questions, while finishing on a heart warming note:

I had a professor once who is from the Miso people, who live in a remote part of northeast India.  He told us how, when he was a child, missionaries came to his village.  The Miso people had no written language.  The missionaries reduced the Miso language to writing, in part motivated by a desire to produce Miso-language Bibles.  They also established a school, the first his village had ever had.  Thanks to those missionaries my professor went on ultimately to get a Ph.D. from Princeton.  He told us that the most amazing thing he discovered when he came to America was the pervasive negative impression of Christians.  All he had ever known of Christians was goodness, love and self-sacrifice.

Missionary Life

Picking up on the previous link, my friend Ed Lauber has a fascinating story about some of the challenges he faced as a missionary in West Africa. Mark has some provocative thoughts on the current economic crisis which are informed by his experience of living in Africa:

As European news is filled with dread about the economic situation on a daily basis, I wonder if in fact the crisis is more a crisis of belief in an economic system, a paradigm where the golden rule is that we all act selfishly in the belief that this will bring prosperity and happiness to all. A system where we who are rich just look after ourselves, getting richer while at the same time believing that our greed is actually helping the poor too. A system where we feel we have the right to ever-increasing wealth, turning a blind eye to those who don’t seem to be benefiting in the same way that we are.

The Gospel Coalition challenges to consider cancelling our short term mission trips, while Nathan gives seven good reasons to support missionaries (if you need a missionary to support, you could always start with us!).
Meanwhile, Jamie has some brilliant observations on the subject of being a missionary:

We’ve watched our friends meet other missionaries and noticed that sometimes when they hear that word, something weird happens. We’ve seen couples who are simply living together suddenly become husband and wife, foul mouthed jocks suddenly wax eloquent, beer aficionados become teetotalers for the moment, and raunchy stories about what happened last Friday night get tabled for another time.

In my experience, it seems the only people who feel excited to cross paths with a missionary are other missionaries, and people who feel a religious kinship with missionaries.

Theology-ish

Recently, I was amused see someone on twitter talking about the differences between Africa and Europe, when their whole experience of Africa was one trip to Nairobi. Africa is a huge and highly diverse continent and to think that you know about it after one trip to Nairobi is a bit like assuming that you know about Europe on the basis of one visit to Copenhagen. In a similar vein, this short article tries to get to grips with ‘African theology’. It’s a good place to start, but it is no more than a start!

The Bible and Mission Blog points us to an excellent resource from Chris Wright and there is an excellent piece from an Australian journal on heart language worship in multi-cultural contexts.

Brian has posted lots of good and thoughtful stuff over the past few weeks. There is too much for me to link to everything, so just head over to his blog and have a read.

For those interested in witness and ministry among Muslims, there is an absolutely excellent, and very challenging paper in the latest edition of IJFM.

You cannot carry the gospel to the Muslim world today without having a clear and well-articulated opinion on the Palestinian tragedy, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on US global military involvement and its offensive neo-colonial support for autocratic regimes and dictators to guard its own economic interests.

Lastly, I’ve not linked to a cartoon by Dave Walker for a while, but this one is well worth a look!

This CartoonChurch.com cartoon by Dave Walker originally appeared in the Church Times.

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.