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.