“Empowering others” has become quite a buzzword in missions circles. Missionaries nowadays are trained not to be the solutions to problems but rather to be catalysts for local solutions and local problem solvers. I acceded to this orientation during my training mostly...
Baby Steps A Bible translator in Papua New Guinea spends his or her early years becoming a child again. Or so it seems. Most of us arrive here having spent the better part of our lives getting an education. When we move to a rural village, though, we essentially...
Fibi has had a hard life. As an Apal-speaking woman living in a small village tucked deep inside Papua New Guinea’s tropical rainforest, she is accustomed to the challenges of daily life. Yet it seems that she has experienced more than her share of hardship. Fibi...
It was 1993. I was in junior high at the time, sporting fluffy bangs, big glasses, and braces, and my main worry was navigating the crowded halls of Kirby Junior High so as to ensure a seat in class next to someone I knew. Activities at school and church consumed most...
Checks and Balances The air conditioner gently hummed behind me, making a valiant effort to cool the room and remove some of the 95% humidity of Madang, Papua New Guinea. I sat at one corner of a conference table, staring into my laptop screen, comparing what I was...
Derek and Allison were eager to start translating God’s Word with a Bibleless people group in Africa. They had made their home among the Muliga people and had begun learning their language. Their next step was to facilitate a meeting in which local leaders would...
What does “hope” mean? I am a translator, and my work involves parsing meanings of words to their core components with the purpose of identifying functional equivalents across languages. So naturally, this is where I began with a word like “hope.” The word “hope” is...
Because prayer is the strategy of Pioneer Bible Translators, our worldwide team intentionally sets aside a day of fasting and prayer every month. On this day, we join in unified prayer, offering up to our Father praises and requests collected especially for this day....
Because prayer is the strategy of Pioneer Bible Translators, our worldwide team intentionally sets aside a day of fasting and prayer every month. On this day, we join in unified prayer, offering up to our Father praises and requests collected especially for this day....
From an early age, we learn to connect the name of an object with the written word that represents it. Young children are taught that “cat” refers to a small animal with fur and claws who likes to chase mice. Our world revolves around those connections...
One of our teammates facilitates a Bible translation in Africa, working primarily from her home in the U.S. Earlier this year she visited her friends in their desert home to share recently translated Scripture with them. She needed their feedback on how clearly and...
Decades ago Dave and Alice Parrish and their daughters established their home among the Mbore people in order to translate God’s Word for them. The people’s hope that they would one day have Scripture in their own language began to be realized. In the ensuing years...