I pray and trust you're doing well! It's been good to be in contact with many of you by phone or by email during the season of shelter-in-place. Thanks for praying our way through this together as we all face unique challenges during the season. This week I just want to highlight some of the exciting opportunities and challenges that we're facing in Bible translation.
Video Transcript:
I pray and trust you're doing well! It's been good to be in contact with many of you by phone or by email during the season of shelter-in-place. Thanks for praying our way through this together as we all face unique challenges during the season. This week I just want to highlight some of the exciting opportunities and challenges that we're facing in Bible translation.
In the recent years we have been excited to see a huge expansion and acceleration of Bible translation in the country of Indonesia. This is a place that has a lot of challenges for Bible translation. Geographic breadth and scope—it’s a tremendously huge country. More than 17,000 islands, lots of linguistic diversity, you’ve got religious diversity, all kinds of challenges that are in place that have limited the expansion of Bible translation in the past.
But in recent years we've seen an exciting expansion into more than a hundred fifty new language just in the past three years. As that’s happened, one of the things that we realize is that the geographic isolation especially has really handicapped a lot of these groups as they're trying to move forward in their Bible translations.
And those of you who've been connected with us for many years probably know about out Bible Translation Acceleration Kits (BTAKs). These are solar panels and a solar-powered modem that allows these kind of isolated groups to connect to the internet, have access to online resources, be able to upload their translations for safety and security, be able to collaborate with others during the process of the translation.
So right now we're highlighting the need to connect 50 of these language groups that have recently begun Bible translation in Indonesia with these kind of internet connections in order to overcome that isolation and help them continue to make progress in their Bible translations.
Our technical team in Indonesia says that these connections actually are quite inexpensive, about $1,500 a piece, so we're not looking at a whole lot of money for each of these languages. But it certainly is a challenge that we want to overcome so that they can move forward. You can learn more about this on our website at http://www.wycliffeassociates.org. And we'd love to have you join us in praying and in supporting this progress in Bible translation there.
Take care, stay in touch, and we'll talk to you again soon
