As we start another week coping with the global coronavirus pandemic, I thought it'd be a good time to give you another update about how things are going at Wycliffe Associates, as well as with our Bible translation partners around the world. Here is a video I recorded from home for you, and a transcript is below.
Video transcript:
As we start another week coping with the global coronavirus pandemic, I thought it'd be a good time to give you another update about how things are going at Wycliffe Associates, as well as with our Bible translation partners around the world.
One of the things that is becoming clearer every day is that the impact of this virus varies dramatically in different places around the world. In congested urban areas where the population is cramped and close together the impact of the viruses is pretty severe. In other parts of the world where remote rural areas are basically even unaffected at this point.
And among many of our Bible translation partners COVID-19 is not going to make the top 10 threats that they face on a daily basis anytime soon. They've been dealing with things like civil unrest, religious persecution, poverty, chronic illness, all of these kinds of things for years. And yet despite all of those challenges they have seen Bible translation as a high enough priority—an urgent priority—for them to pay attention to, to meet the needs of their people, and that continues to be the case despite the changing dynamics that were sitting around the world right now.
For the past six years Bible translation has shifted more and more to the place where we're equipping the local church, the local believers, to do this work themselves, and we've done that to specific ways.
One is by bringing trading directly to their communities so that they know how to steward God’s word for themselves, so they can do that translation work for their communities. And secondly bringing them technology like Tablets for National Translators and Print on Demand. These kind of tools that enable them to take care of their Scripture, protected it from harm, distribute it easily within their communities, all those kinds of things. So those strategies are serving us very well actually during this season of time.
One of the things that we're doing and during this time as we're staying in contact with our partners around the world: we're still coaching them and encouraging them on the completions of their translations. In fact, just this morning I had an email from a group in Papua New Guinea who just finished eight more books in the New Testament, so they're making great progress despite the challenges that are changing around them.
We are also working with other locations who are continuing to be able to work their workshops for Bible translation in their communities. One specifically that comes to mind is a Deaf translation for video translation in the Deaf community in Cameroon. So we're still continuing to see that progress.
We're also moving forward with our Each One Reach One strategy which is to contact each of our 1600 language partners, Bible translation partners around the world, to encourage them to take their experience, their vision, and use their access that they have to groups around them that are still without Scripture so that they can encourage others to begin the Bible translation process during these days.
So we encourage you to just keep us in prayer. We appreciate your partnership in this—we're praying for you as well, as I have said earlier.
We're all in this together and it's exciting to see how God is going to redeem these times in a way that only He can.
