Highlighting unfoldingWord

I want to highlight the Bible translation organization, unfoldingWord, which has been the main sponsor of the CNTR. unfoldingWord’s motto is “The Church in every people group, the Bible in every language”. While this is also the goal of many other Christian organizations, there are a few aspects of unfoldingWord’s approach that are somewhat unique:

1. Church-Centric Bible Translation (CCBT). unfoldingWord empowers the native church to be in charge of the Bible translation process from start to finish, which ensures that the resulting translation is relevant, utilized, and updatable if necessary. In order to do translation, there needs to be knowledge of both the source and target language. A seminary graduate knows Hebrew/Greek, but not the target language, while the native church knows their own language, but not the biblical languages. So instead of trying to convince the declining population of seminary graduates to go and live in a jungle somewhere, it is much easier to empower the native church with the necessary training, software, and materials to do the task themselves – something they are more than willing to do, and which has already shown excellent results.

2. Open Resources. In many cases, the resources needed to do excellent Bible translation have been copyrighted and restricted, and sometimes the resulting Bible translations have been copyrighted and controlled by the West, restricting what the native church can do with their own Bible translation, and preventing them from making updates to it when needed. unfoldingWord, like the CNTR, is dedicated to making all necessary materials free and open source and has already contributed many software tools and content, and continues to work to open up even more resources.

3. Exponential Growth. When #1 and #2 are combined together, it creates a conducive environment for Bible translations to multiply exponentially. The old model where a seminary graduate goes to live in a jungle doesn’t scale well, as it may take them 20 plus years to do one Bible translation as their life’s work, but after that they don’t go on to do another. Just to give you an idea of the rate of progress, there are over 7000 different languages, and after centuries of Bible translation work, there are not even 800 complete Bible translations finished. But unfoldingWord advocates the “trainer trains the trainers” approach, where after each church network learns the process to do their own Bible translation, they then teach other church networks how to do their own. This new model has already begun and has already multiplied the number of new Bible translations underway.

Thus, as the Lord leads, I would like to encourage you to consider giving to unfoldingWord (in addition, of course, to continuing to give to the CNTR!)