Mark and Laura Woodward, supporting Bible translation in Tanzania
Having been in Mpanda for three months now we are starting to feel settled and are enjoying our work, making friends and organising our house to feel like a home! I’m particularly enjoying my job as operations manager, helping to set up and maintain the office for the project as our colleagues work with the local language communities…
The BBC has a great 2-minute video about the translation of parts of the Bible into Jamaican Patois for the first time. This has been a controversial project for many of the same reasons that the English Bible was not accepted when it was first translated over 600 years ago (as I wrote about on the Wycliffe UK blog back in 2008).
Our Bible study group continued a couple of weeks ago, trying to read the book of Matthew as the original hearers might have heard it, understanding the role the narrative played in the mission of God at that time, and the missional implications for the church as we engage with the text in our own situation.
Did Jesus preach the gospel? What do we mean by the gospel? Is our definition, which is often centred around us, our sin, God’s wrath, and God’s plan through Jesus to rescue us from his judgement, actually what the biblical authors have in mind when they talk about the gospel?
Race and ethnicity have always been hot topics for as long as people have been around, and remain so today in a great many parts of the world. In the church too these issues are often present, if only in the fact that many Western churches remain almost entirely mono-cultural and mono-racial even when they are located in culturally diverse neighbourhoods.