Bible Translation on the Mission Field

How did you approach Bible translation work on the missions field?

For us, we wanted it to be the the God of the Bible, His story, coming into direct collision with the gods of the YembiYembis. Because of that we couldn't just present something from our mouth. We had to have something that was objective, that was verifiable, and so we wanted the scriptures pre-gospel so that we could point to that, they could read it, they could see it themselves, they could study it at night, they could take it home with them. That was really important to us.

That pushed us to do a lot of Bible translation prior to the teaching. That was something that I wasn't versed in and so we started off with simple booklets: Flies are your enemies––a book on health­­­­­––Customs of the Jews––the YembiYembi had no idea where the Jews came from. They had no background in that and so we did little booklets like that. There's a lot less pressure when you're translating a health booklet versus Genesis 1, 2, and 3. So, getting up to speed in that we started to get our feet wet in Bible translation. Then it kind of grew from there as we got into deeper and deeper passages.