Month: August 2018

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Language Committees: Part 2

I’m in the middle of a series on language committees, which are currently the focus of my ministry. In my last post, I explained where language committees fit in the five groups that are all needed to make a translation program successful.

In this post, I will present some things that go wrong when the language committee doesn’t do its job well.

If the committee fails to do a good job of choosing the translators, then problems can occur. I witnessed a case where the committee chose translators because they were related to the committee chair. Their translation was so poor that they had to be replaced with translators chosen for their skill. I have seen several cases where churches and Christians started loosing confidence in the translation because one of the translators was not living according to the Bible’s norms. The language committee had messed up either its selection or supervision of the translators.

I was close to one translation where a key church leader denounced the New Testament as soon as it was published. The committee had failed to mobilize all the churches in favor of the translation. The man who denounced the translation perceived, perhaps rightly, that the translation effort was dominated by a rival denomination.

I have seen some cases where the funding agency limited its funding because the churches in the language area contributed far less than they were capable. The committee simply failed to mobilize the churches to give.

Lastly, I know of several cases where translations sit in storerooms unsold and unread. One of the reasons is that the language committees fails to promote the translation or even, in some cases, to distribute it.

I have a list of even more problems caused by ineffective committees, but I think you get the point.

Next week, I’ll talk about the underlying weaknesses of committees that are the source of these problems and what can be done to strengthen committees. As we will see, sometimes committees are ineffective through no fault of their own.

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Language committees: Part 1

For the last few months, I have focused my work in Ghana on the question of making language committees more effective. It’s probably not clear to you what that means, so I’m going to dedicate a few blogs to the topic.

Language committees are a crucial cog in the translation machine serving minority languages in Africa. They play a very different role in translating into major languages like English. So my descriptions do not apply to those languages.

A program to translate the Bible into a language in Ghana involves five groups of people / organizations.

  • Translator’s
  • Reviewers
  • Translation agency
  • Funding agency

    • Language committee

The translators, also called the translation team, are just that – those who do the translation. These days, they are a group of 2-4 speakers of the language screened and chosen for their role and given special training. They are usually employed full time.

The reviewers are a group of unpaid volunteers who meet occasionally to read the draft translation proposed by the translators and comment on it. They mostly consider whether the draft translation communicates clearly.

The translation agency is an organization specializing in translating the Bible. It has experts in biblical languages, translation, and linguistics. It gives training, carries out accuracy checks, identifies which languages need translation, and works with language communities and churches to set up new translation programs, among other tasks.

The funding agency raises funds for translation in smaller languages.

The language committee is a group of unpaid volunteers which meets from time to time to initiate then guide the translation effort. They have a lot of responsibilities such as:

  • Choosing (with the help of the translation organization) and supervising the translators
  • Mobilizing their community in support of the translation, including giving.
  • Coordinating with the translstion and funding agency.
  • Setting program goals (New Testament, Old Testament, Jesus Film. etc.)
  • Promoting and/or organizing adult literacy
  • Choosing the reviewers and assuring they work well.
  • Stocking and distributing the translation,

As you can see, the language committee is, or at least should be, the glue that holds all the pieces together. In my next post, I’ll give examples of what can go wrong if the committee does not do its job well.

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Limits of reason

God gave us reason as one of our faculties.

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord” – Isaiah 1:18

But reason has its limits. When groups of missionaries work together on Bible translation, they have to make decisions together. So we try to reason through which decision is best. This works pretty well a lot of the time. But when it comes to translation programs the options are so numerous that reasoning through them becomes difficult. Take a literacy program for example:

  • Should it be for adults or children?
  • Should it be for the whole community or only the church?
  • Should teachers be paid or they should should they be volunteers?
  • Should primers be sold or given away? If sold, for how much?
  • How should teachers be recruited? Trained?
  • Should the classes be at night or during the day?
  • Should arithmetic be included?

And on, and on, and on.

If any one of these questions is contentious, discussions can stall. Factions can form. Each side develops more reasons to bolster its position. The situation resembles the following chart.

We have reached the limits of reason and persuasion, but nobody has noticed. All evidence to the contrary, both sides still think they can reason their way through the issue.

The reasonable (pun intended) thing to do is experiment. Try A and B, then evaluate the results. Sometimes we find God’s will by doing, in addition to praying and thinking. After all, it’s called walking with God.

I am tying a remote assignment. I work in Bible translation in Ghana, but live in the USA and make several trips a year to Ghana. I’ve asked around. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. Why is a bit of a mystery. So we’re trying it then we’ll evaluate.

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On losing authority

Missionaries get respect. We are held in high esteem in many churches in the USA. Plus missionaries are respected in many places in Africa. Officials, local people, even those who follow other religions give us deference. However, our ministry of Bible translation undermines our authority, as Yale historian Lamin Sanneh says:
“Often the outcome of vernacular translation was that the missionary lost the position of being the expert.”

In fact, translating the Bible is the perfect way for a missionary to lose the position of expert, even if he or she is still appreciated.

Otabil’s church starting to fill up on Sunday – 2nd service

Earlier this year, I took American friends to the very large church of well-known Pastor Mensah Otabil in Accra, Ghana. He said that his ministry focuses on raising up leaders. He defined a leader as a self-directed individual. I took that to mean someone who takes responsibility before God for his or her actions. Someone who is not dependent on others in an unhealthy way. Someone who has confidence in God and in the Holy Spirit within. Otabil said that he did not want the members of his church to depend on him for every little thing.

Church of Pentecost Council 1954

Church of Pentecost Council 1954 including McKeown, courtesy Church of Pentecost Canada

A famous missionary to Ghana, James McKeown, often told new Christians who tended to depend on the him as their missionary for everything:

I have not come to create beggars but to make men Sons of God.

The members of the church McKeown founded still quote that today to encourage themselves to take hold of the responsibilities God has given them.

Research into the impact of translating the Bible into African language has found that those who read the Bible in their own language take more initiative. They are more likely to witness to their neighbors and to start small businesses. Women speak up more in their families and churches. They are more likely to resist pressure from the proponents of traditional religious practices. They become self-directed individuals, as Otabil put it, or children of God as McKoewn put it.

When we translate, we joyfully and deliberately undermine our authority by putting people in direct contact with a much better authority.

Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ Ephesians 4:14-15 (NLT)
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Ashamed

Apostle Opoku-Oninyah

A couple of years ago, I was in a meeting of the Ghana Evangelism Committee. Most of those present were representing Ghanaian churches. As the name of the committee suggests, it was discussing evangelism. But at the end of the meeting one of those present raised a hot button moral, social and political issue. He wanted to see action taken so he asked that the committee discuss what that might be. The man leading the meeting responded, “Just preach the gospel.”

He had full confidence the gospel was enough to solve the problem. I know the man and I know his church. It is one of the largest churches in Ghana but it was founded by a lone missionary who espoused an unusual mission strategy – that as a missionary would only preach the gospel. That is, he would not undertake any social endeavors such as medical work. He believed that if he founded a solid the church that church would develop social ministries. And that is exactly what happened. Today, the church he founded, The Church of Pentecost, has schools clinics, programs to reduce poverty, and more.

So the man’s confidence that the social and political issue could be solved by just preaching the gospel has deep roots in the history and experience of his church, not to mention in his faith in the power of God.

In Romans 1:16, the Apostle Paul wrote that he was not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God. I have always heard that this means that the Apostle was not embarrassed to speak the Gospel. But there is another way to be ashamed of the Gospel. That is by not having confidence in its power to solve real problems in this world.

Political and social action have their place but they should not displace our trust in the Gospel as the power of God to save eternally and from all kinds of problems here on earth. So, there are two ways to be ashamed of the Gospel:

  • Bring embarrassed to witness
  • Having lost confidence in its real power of the Gospel

I would go so far as to say that if you have a political view on how to solve a problem but not a parallel Gospel view, you might be ashamed of the Gospel. So if you have a political opinion about terrorism, but don’t have equally ardent desire to support Christian ministry to the places from which terrorists come, then maybe you are ashamed of the Gospel.

Last month in Ghana, I heard a leading pastor say that he was asked how the church can contribute to national development. His answer? Through obeying the Great Commission. He went on to talk about how evangelism transforms.

It seems that confidence in the power of the Gospel can be found throughout Ghana.

 

 

It’s news I’m most proud to proclaim, this extraordinary Message of God’s powerful plan to rescue everyone who trusts him, starting with Jews and then right on to everyone else! God’s way of putting people right shows up in the acts of faith, confirming what Scripture has said all along: “The person in right standing before God by trusting him really lives.” – Romans 1:16 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans1:16&version=MSG