— This letter is from [the president of our organization] Please feel free to share it with your ministry partners as desired. —
July 2013
Dear Colleagues,
On a trip into an isolated mountain area of South Asia, my wife, Dallas, and I met a lady who is 100 years old. Some years ago, the Good News reached her village and she became one of the first believers. God’s Word did not exist in her language, so she and others in her village worshipped in the state language.
She is part of a language community that has been estranged from a neighboring group for nearly 100 years—her entire life! Their languages are very closely related, and they share a common oral history, but for the last century they have also shared a strong desire to avoid each other. At times they have viewed each other with outright hostility.
Recently, however, that hostility has begun to melt as the result of Bible translation. A team from each of these languages joined a multi-language Bible translation project—a “cluster project”—and began to translate the Gospel of Mark. Each team translated for their own people, sharing skills and insights with teams from other related languages.
When the teams from the two antagonistic communities finished the Gospel of Mark, they decided to hold a joint celebration to dedicate the Scriptures. It was an amazing success! The Scriptures brought the two communities together for a time of rejoicing around the recently translated Good News. According to the South Asian partner who accompanied us, this may have been the first time in 40 years that the groups came together for anything!
The Apostle Paul wrote about a similar reconciliation in Ephesians 2:16: "Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups [Jews and Gentiles] to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death." (NLT)
The Spirit of God is at work in the South Asian mountains, drawing men, women and children to Himself with the good news that they can be reconciled to God and to each other through the Message of Hope. Dallas and I were witnesses to this living example of Paul’s ancient and true words, and we were filled with wonder as we tried to imagine what it must feel like, particularly for this 100-year-old lady, to live without the Word—and then to receive it and watch it begin to transform two communities.
After many years of relating to God in a language that came in from the outside, this elderly believer can now hear the Gospel in her own language. She can sing worship songs with other believers in her own language. She can respond to God and to the neighbors on the other side of the language divide in new ways because now God speaks her language!
