Tuesday, October 05, 2010

With the People

Twenty years ago, John & Sue and his family were friends and colleagues of ours in Mozambique. They lived in a village on the edge of the Great Forest in the northern part of the country. Their house was mud block and thatch built with help from local villagers, and like their neighbours they lived without mains electricity or running water. Over years, John has worked to determine a way of writing the previously unwritten Makuwa-Meeto language. John and Sue trained a team of Makuwa translators who are now rendering the Bible into Makuwa-Meeto. In addition, literacy programmes are running and aspiring writers are encouraged to create books of folk tales, local history, health guides and children’s books.

John was attending a Wycliffe Bible Translators meeting here in Singapore and it was so good to catch up with him. He showed me his “Shoebox” software – over 3, 000 Makuwa-Meeto words recorded, with their meaning, their phonetic equivalent, their grammatical description and more. For hundreds of words, there were notes on cultural practices and world-view. The painstaking research and passionate interest in the Makuwa-Meeto language, culture and world view and the affection that John and Sue had for their many Makuwa friends and colleagues was deeply moving. It gives the lie to the often-repeated fallacy that Christian mission has undermined and destroyed culture. Rather there is a passion to see God speak in every language to every heart and see every culture redeemed.

We want to see God speak too - Lamentations 3 is not the easiest chapter in the Bible to understand or to talk about meaningfully. How can an ancient dirge, written over 2,500 years ago and 5,000 miles away in a vastly different culture and language speak to families in safe, secure Singapore? But the Griffiths family have been tasked to take on this chapter as the theme for the next Family Service at our church here in Singapore. We’ll need to understand it deeply but tell it simply, in ways that children and adults can understand. Please pray for all four of us as we put the service together in (hopefully) creative ways.

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