“The beauty and glory of Christianity is that we believe God works in all different languages.” —Dana Roberts
Language
How big is the world? In terms of people groups without the Gospel, and languages without the Bible, it may be bigger than you think.
Christians are at the forefront in gathering data about ethnicities and languages around the world, for one simple reason: The Church has a global...
“That Jesus requires his disciples to observe all that he commanded—not just some easy-to-understand concepts in a foreign language—further suggests the enterprise and necessity of Bible translation.” —Chris Tachick
“No one can penetrate very deeply into the minds and hearts of the people till he has learned to speak to them in their own mother tongue. A missionary is incapable of knowing the thoughts, ambitions and deepest throbbing of the native heart without first knowing his manner of speech”. —John G....
"Just as each culture brings something new to humanity, so does every language. Each language is capable of expressing some things better than all other languages. Why else do coffee shops sell cafe latte rather than milky coffee? On a deeper note, each language has the ability to express itself...
"Words are not coins, dead things whose value can be mathematically computed. You cannot quote an exact English equivalent for a French word, as you might quote an exact English equivalent for a French coin. Words are living things, full of shades of meaning, full of associations; and, what is...
Many Bible translation projects focus on the needs of very small people groups. Some of these minority languages have only a few thousand speakers. Is it right to invest so much in a major project like Bible translation for so few people?
“Our mother tongue is the language in which God speaks to each of us. He does not speak in a sacred language, but in the ordinary language, so that we may hear him and realize that this gospel is about us and that we have been invited to join a company drawn from every people, tribe, tongue,...
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. —Psalm 63:1
The official number of languages needing Bible translation just went up—not down! The new statistics were released just over two months ago. I noticed because I was watching, and because it was so opposite of what we had seen in the past.
This unexpected turn in the numbers points to...