Quite a few years ago, I was following a national organization doing Bible translation in a particular African country. Their board let their director go and brought in a new director. He brought in new top-level staff and they set about making some changes to the organization.

In the course of making the changes, they found that one of the translation project leaders was embezzling funds. They fired him and set about finding a new project leader. They also informed the US organization which was funding that translation project. That organization wrote back that they were stopping funding because of the fraud. They did not suspend funding pending a resolution of the issue, but rather stopped it permanently.

Now, I can understand stopping funding as a gut reaction. But I wondered if they really thought about the impact of what they were doing.

First, the people group still needed a translation. The embezzlement didn’t change that. Should they not get a translation because one person acted badly?

Second, they stopped funding to an organization that was undergoing reforms that had caught the problem. That didn’t seem like the right way to reward reformers who were fixing things.

Perhaps stopping funding gave a good feeling to the leaders of the funding organization or perhaps it made them look tough on fraud in front of their donors. But I could not think of any positive effect for the kingdom of God where the translation was happening. There, reformers were a bit disheartened and the people group saw their translation stop.

However, the reformers did go on to put in place a system where well-chosen local committees had oversight over the translation, and that put a virtual end to problems with missing and miss-spent money for translations.