The Exponential Journey
Khartoum, Sudan, April 2021. I was sitting in a small hotel conference room with the leaders of Greater Reach Alliance and half a dozen representatives of unreached Sudanese people groups. We were talking about the potential of Church-Centric Bible Translation for their people. Wanting to illustrate what God had done in other places, I shared a brief video of some South Asian brothers and sisters celebrating with exuberant singing and dancing the Bible in their language for the first time.
Suddenly, a man toward the back of the room began audibly weeping. I thought, uh oh, what have I done? His name is Faheem. He’s a high school physics teacher and member of the Masalit, a half-a-million member people group in western Sudan. When he regained his composure, I asked, "Can you tell us why you are so moved?"
Through a translator, he replied, "I can never imagine a day when that will be true for my people. I can never imagine a day when the Masalit will have God's Word in our language."
Faheem believed that because he had not yet witnessed the exponential power of Church-Centric Bible Translation. But soon, he became part of the movement.
The demand for Bible translation tools, training, and content from global church planting networks is growing. From a handful of people with a vision and no funding in 2017 to a team of about a hundred, and a rapidly expanding budget, unfoldingWord has grown exponentially to now be impacting people groups on four continents.
We are committed to empowering the world's largest workforce, the global church, with the open-licensed tools, training, and biblical content it needs to plant the church in every people group with the Bible in every language. Using the Gateway Languages strategy, teams from every one of the 7,000 language groups on earth can translate God's Word for themselves, clearly and accurately, in less time and less expensively than ever before.
The field reports and stories on this website illustrate that the exponential strategy is working. But Bible translation has never been easy, and that hasn't changed. One of the missing pieces in the modern era of Bible translation is the lack of good theological education and linguistics training among unreached people groups. unfoldingWord® Equipping Journey was developed and field tested in 2022 to address that. Equipping Journey helps church-planting Bible translators lay a foundation for their faith and ministry, giving them the theological worldview to do accurate, high-quality Bible translations as they plant churches.
Church-Centric Bible Translation can succeed where the traditional approach cannot. Places like Sudan, Iran, Middle Eastern Muslim countries, and North African regions with political, cultural, and religious persecution that make traditional Bible translation methods untenable. Church-Centric Bible Translation can also reach totally unreached people groups that, though numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands, are too small for the limited human resources available to traditional Bible translation agencies. But the church in those parts of the world has the human resources. The believers and church-planting networks already in or near these areas want to make their own Bible translations and are willing to take risks and do the work.
But one thing more holds them back: the belief that they are not educated enough, wise enough, or holy enough to do it. Our friend, Faheem, is a good example. Now, in just a year's time, his people have Open Bible stories in Masalit, and he's moving into scripture translation from Job and Genesis. He's on the exponential journey, with five other unreached Sudanese people groups, to having the Bible for his people.
It is an enormous privilege to tell these brothers and sisters, "This is possible. You can get there. We will walk with you to help you." Won't you join us?
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Your investment will help empower church networks worldwide to translate the whole Bible into their ethnic languages for the very first time.
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Stories From the Field
Ten Times Faster
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Jeremiah and the Occult King
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When Jeremiah* first heard that his Chadian church-planting network needed his help translating unfoldingWord® Open Bible Stories (OBS), he was skeptical. “I thought Bible stories were for children, l...
The Exponential Journey
- April 10, 2023
Khartoum, Sudan, April 2021. I was sitting in a small hotel conference room with the leaders of Greater Reach Alliance and half a dozen representatives of unreached Sudanese people groups. We were ta...
Iran: Bibles in every language
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Escape from Kharkiv
- June 13, 2022
BAM! A rocket penetrates a building, shattering windows and shaking foundations. Clatter! Bomb debris splatters cars, building façades, and adjacent roofs. Bang-Bang-Bang! The jackhammer staccato of A...
Innovation in Bible Translation
- March 13, 2023
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Breakthrough in Chad
- July 04, 2022
Three churches were birthed when a local chieftain, who formerly combined Islam and the occult, came to Christ. In the another community, new believers were baptized, and two new churches were planted...
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- April 06, 2022
The challenge Pastor Manish was facing seemed insurmountable. His 300,000-member South Asian mountain people group desperately needs Scripture in the language they understand best. Pastor Manish, an e...
Ruska Roma celebrate first Scripture in their language
- September 20, 2021
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Escape from Kharkiv
- June 28, 2022
BAM! A rocket penetrates a building, shattering windows and shaking foundations. Clatter! Bomb debris splatters cars, building façades, and adjacent roofs. Bang-Bang-Bang! The jackhammer staccato of A...
Oscarcito and the Yanomami
- June 23, 2022
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- April 06, 2022
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A Scrap of Paper that Changed a Life
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Bible Without a Village
- December 27, 2021
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Iran: Bibles in every language
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Maryam the Librarian
- March 08, 2023
Maryam was a little girl living near the Iran/Iraq border when war broke out in the 1980s. When she was still very young, her family moved to Tehran to escape the fighting, but the move did not fill t...
Paying the Price of Persecution
- March 13, 2023
"We have been invited to the police station many, many times," said Pastor Vic*. "We have been harassed and so has the Bible translation team. Some of our original team members left because of the ris...
Zafar's Favorite Tool
- March 13, 2023
This year, unfoldingWord completed the initial training of the Russian Gateway Language team. All 50 Open Bible Stories and nine Scripture Book Packages are now available in Russian, serving as the Ga...
Inside a Church-Centric Bible Translation Workshop
- March 13, 2023
A large conference room in sub-Saharan Africa is filled with 45 Sudanese men and women. Gathered around tables in groups of five or six, laptops open, with soft conversations punctuated by occasional ...