eLibraries: Multiplied!

“We could use 200 more of these!”

That was the reply I received after supplying seven digital libraries on electronic tablets last August to a ministry leader working with house-church leaders in a key country in the Middle East (see blog post of Sept 16). Thanks to generous partnership help from Mission Aviation Fellowship Learning Technology Division and the Digital Bible Society, the basic content for these eLibraries has already been set up. So, fulfilling this new request should not be that difficult. It will mean acquiring the tablets, loading the memory card with the digital resources, and testing them out before sending them off for use.

 And the amazing thing is that I believe I can do it all for $300 each!

For that price, I can purchase a brand-new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, a micro SD card, a protective case, and a power adapter and still have enough to pay a young local geek to help me with the project.

One Challenge International (OC International), my mission organization, has already set up a special project account for me so that I can start accepting donations toward these units. To contribute, you first click on this link https://donate.onechallenge.org/, fill in the designation, “eLibrary Project #830451,” and submit your credit card information.  All donations will be fully tax-deductible.

Having been in mission work for some thirty-five years, I don’t think I've ever seen a ministry investment opportunity that has any more bang-for-the-buck than this project. Just think—for a $300 investment, someone can supply a turn-key, ready-to-use, personal digital library to a house-church leader that will contain two versions of the Bible, a Bible commentary, eight custom-picked books on Christian living, a lay-counselor’s guide, a hymnbook, two CDs of worship songs, an audio New Testament and videos of the Jesus Film, The Jesus Story (for children), and Magdelena (for women)—all in the local language.

Two hundred is a big number, but I intend to prepare these eLibraries for delivery in batches of ten to twenty as the funding resources come in. I certainly hope you’ll consider becoming an investor in this exciting project.

African Overachiever?

And I thought I was busy being involved with four different mission organizations!

But during the past couple of days, I learned it would be impossible to match the output of one particular Nigerian mission leader, especially one with the ambitions of Timothy Olonade.

With Timothy Olonade in Nigeria

This past Saturday and Sunday, I agreed to participate in a pastor’s conference that Timothy was presenting in the capital city of Abuja. I’ve known Tim for some time, meeting up with him here and there in various global consultation over the past twenty years. However, this is the first time I’ve had the privilege of seeing him in action—on his own turf. Passionate about getting local pastors to fully use the Bible in their own preaching, his practical workshop has taught them to use such resources as the Preacher’s Outline Bible. By the end of the conference, I was impressed how both pastors and their wives were capable of taking any passage and present a five minute mini-sermon complete with three or four points.

But this is just the beginning of Timothy’s impressive list of involvements. Summarizing all of it under the label of M2414 (for Mathew 24:14) here are just SOME of his activities:

·         BLM – Bible for Life & Ministry Workshop

·         Kairos: Connecting God, the Church and the World

·         GIST: Global Impact Strategic Training

·         EWI: Encountering the World of Islam Seminars

·         MDN: Mentor Development Network

·         PIN: Professionals into the Nations

·         EEG: Engagement with Elders at the Gate (encouraging senior leaders)

If that isn't enough, Timothy is also the Africa rep for Global Mapping International besides serving on the steering committees of the Lausanne Movement and the Ethne-To-Ethne consultation. Even his wife, Hannah has followed his example launching Women of God International and the SMILES Initiative, a ministry to widows and orphans.

I’ve learned that articulate national mission leaders like Timothy are usually in high demand on the international speaking circuit. That has certainly been true of him in the past. But what I really appreciate most about these two days of working together is seeing how Timothy is living out his new commitment to turn down international invitations and focus his remaining years on mentoring the next generation of pastors and leaders right here in his own country.

Overachievers or not, I'm praying that Africa can produce a lot more key leaders with that same kind of commitment!

eHarmony. . . Nigerian Style

While here in Nigeria this past week for a leadership training workshop, I've heard some amazing stories of the latest money-making schemes being concocted by creative scam artists.  Unfortunately, these are actually church leaders.

Nigerian young people worshiping in the church
 I attended this morning

Apparently one of the latest varieties of the “Name it--claim it” prosperity gospel is a way to tie the knot with that special someone you don’t have the nerve to propose to or whose parents you think would disapprove of you as a son-in-law. By simply handing over between 50,000 to 100,000 Naira to church elders, they will arrange a secret briefing with the pastor who will suddenly get a “word from the Lord” in the middle of a future sermon.

“God has just told me there is a young woman wearing a red dress somewhere in this section of the church who is supposed to marry a young man in a black suit over here,” he will say. “Come out, come out and be identified.  This is what the Lord wants you to do. If you disobey, you will pay the consequences of God’s wrath.”

And, of course... who would want to go against a "word from the Lord?!" For the scheming young man, wedding bells are just around the corner.

I’ve also learned this same technique is being applied in other ways as well, such as people wanting to get employed by a certain business or others needing to be forgiven an outstanding debt. Whatever the case, these false pastors are turning their Pentecostal-style churches into big business. 

However, in some recent case, there was such in-fighting between elders and pastor on how to divvy up their scam money that police had to be called in to settle the conflict, thus exposing their less-than-divine practices.

Guess the truth of Number 32:23 still stands: “Be sure your sin will find you out.”

Leadership Essentials Workshop

“This workshop has been a real eye-opener to what leadership is all about. I am much thankful.”

That was a typical comment I received after completing a three day leadership training on behalf of Wycliffe Associates here in Jos, Nigeria with members of the national Bible translation organization.  A result of an organizational capacity assessment exercise I conducted with them last March, this was the requested training workshop they wanted me to come back and conduct for them.

Workshop Participants (top) Teamwork exercise to build
the tallest paper cup tower (bottom)

So, for seven hours a day Wednesday through Friday, I presented a basic Management 101 type course based heavily on the Managerial Leadership handbook of Robert Orr, a Canadian friend who has been doing this sort of training for years with Brazilian and other national ministries.

What was particularly interesting for me was to hear the many responses from folks when I was talking about good practices in mentoring, job performance reviews,  and developing the next generation of leaders. “This is so foreign to our Nigerian culture,” they said. “So often, leaders are threatened by their subordinates and will actually try to keep them from being successful.” The chairman of the board, a retired Army colonel,  gave a dramatic example when a military superior assigned him a task that was virtually impossible to do. “I know he did not expect me to complete it, probably thinking it would prevent any further promotion for me,” he said. “When I worked hard and was actually able to finish the job, I could tell he was so surprised.”

Another topic that generated a lot of discussion was on how to help leaders finish well. Again, the amount of corruption among Nigerian business, political and even church leaders is so common here that it has come to be a regular expectation of anyone in leadership.

Working through these cultural differences is certainly a challenge for a ministry like the Nigerian Bible Translation Trust. But from the strong affirmation I received for the material presented, I certainly hope it will have an impact in spurring greater integrity, efficiency and effectiveness in future translation projects.  

eLibrary: Delivered!

Seven are now in the hands of house-church leaders in a restricted-access country in the Middle East! What are they? Something I have been dreaming about for a long time—a complete personal library self-contained on a personal electronic tablet.

For a number of years, I have been wondering how to supply pastors, Bible students, and ministry leaders with access to books, commentaries, Bibles, and other resources that are simply not available to them. I’ve met so many in the  Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa who desperately want more training resources, but cannot get them due either to cost or an inadequate supply of printed material.

Thanks to a great collaborative effort by a number of friends, on August 1, I delivered seven Samsung Galaxy Tabs (tablets) to the head of a ministry working with underground Christians in that country. Each is completely equipped with a custom-designed library of resources for house-church pastors—all in the local language! What a treat it was for me to bring together content from the Digital Bible Society, special software developed by MAF’s Learning Technology division, and generous funding from a Sunday School class at First Evangelical Free Church, Fullerton, California, to make this project happen.

When the Tabs where handed out at a special discipleship training event in a neighboring country, the recipients were shown how they could access such things as books on understanding Christianity by R.C. Sproul, two complete Bibles, the MacDonald Bible commentary, a layman’s counseling handbook, a hymnbook, an audio version of the New Testament, CDs of ethnic worship songs, and several full-length videos, including the Jesus Film, Jesus Story, and Magdalena.

Now my friend tells me he could easily use 200 more of the units for other house-church leaders in that same country!  If that isn't enough, after showing demos of this eLibrary to church leaders in Congo DRC, I'm now receiving requests for the same sort of resource to be supplied to them, except in French, Lingala and Swahili. 

I'm excited to see this dream come to fruition and hope more useful applications can be developed for it in the months ahead.

Road Trip

It was only 260 kilometers—about 150 miles. Back home, it would have been a trip of two and a half hours; but here in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it was different. VERY different! In fact, this road trip illustrated what an adventure driving can become when road maintenance is neglected for over ten years.

One of the many "adventurous" sections of our road trip!

It all started when I was asked to visit the head office of ACOTBA-SUBO, one of the Congolese agencies handling Bible translation in the country. I had only two ways to get from Bangui, Central African Republic to their office in Gemena, capital of the far northwest province of DRC. The first choice was to wait around for several weeks for the Wycliffe Cameroon JAARS plane, which makes occasional trips to Gemena every couple months. The second was to cross the Ubangi River by dugout canoe, then hop on a chartered Hilux 4x4 truck for a nine-hour drive. Needless to say, I opted for the second choice.

What I didn’t opt for was the most incredible, jaw-jarring, seat-jolting, mind-boggling road trip I’ve ever been on! What is left of this stretch of the international African highway from Cape Town to Casablanca can hardly be called a road anymore. Deep ruts three- to four-feet deep cut across the route everywhere, and regular washouts force detours into the bush. The rainy season makes every single pothole a major mud hole or small lake.

Example of stuck truck--after two days of digging!

Fortunately for me, Luka, the full-time, professional chauffeur of ACOTBA-SUBA was driving the trusty Toyota Hilux; and a true professional he was! Navigating the slippery mud holes and gutted mini-ravines along the way, he quickly proved to me he knew what he was doing. At times, he would even stop in front of a mud hole and discuss with his assistant the best way to traverse. Nevertheless, there were still a number of times I really believed we would not make it and become totally stuck like the dozen or so other vehicles we passed along the way. Can you guess the average time it takes to dig out a vehicle along this road? Two to three days!

If I’ve impressed you so far, perhaps I will impress you further by reporting that I made this trip with Luka not once, but twice within a three-day period. Now that I realize how crazy it was to attempt such a tight schedule, I can only say how grateful I am that no significant incident happened both going and coming back.

Although my new knowledge might change my future travel planning, I can’t say I’m sorry for the experience. First, the time spent consulting with the director of ACOTBA-SUBA (reported in my previous blog post) was really significant and worth every mile. Second, I will always remember these three days as the time when I gained a brand-new perspective and understanding of what it means to be a contemporary Congolese living in a truly broken country. When provincial leaders consistently line their own pockets with the funds designated for road upkeep, it helps one understand why everyone here feels so used and abused. Nothing short of a moral and spiritual revolution that transforms worldviews and mindsets across this entire country will ever bring the kind of change that can make a difference—to roads and everything else.

Which, by the way, is exactly what God teaches throughout Romans 12. Maybe ACOTBA-SUBO’s labors to produce God’s written truth in dozens of local languages will help start that revolution! 

With Luka--a truly professional chauffeur!

Mother Tongue

Ever heard of a MTBTO?

I hadn’t either until I had a chance to visit two of them last week at the end of my visit to central Africa. It stands for Mother Tongue Bible Translation Organization. These organizations are revolutionizing how God’s Word is made accessible to people who have never read the Bible before in their own language.

ACATBA translation team in Bangui, CAR

Commissioned by Wycliffe Associates to check out to the best way to help MTBTOs develop organizationally, I had the privilege of spending some quality time with two exceptional local leaders and their respective national organizations. ACATBA in the Central African Republic (CAR) and ACOTBA-SUBO in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are separated by only 150 miles, but each organization is responsible for the primary oversight of key translation projects in their countries.

Having hung around mission circles for a long time, I thought I had a good handle on what Bible translation is all about. After the past few days, nothing could be farther from the truth! I have been amazed at how much I learned through my interviews with these men and their dedicated staff. Here are just a few highlights:

• ·         Gone, pretty much, are the days of highly-trained, Western-born, linguistic specialists who come to the African jungle to dedicate at least ten years to learning a local language and then another ten or twenty years to producing a copy of the New or Old Testament. That job has now been replaced by a team of three or four “mother-tongue” national workers who already speak the language and, with only couple years (or even months) of basic orientation, are generating first-draft translations in a third or fourth of the traditional time.
• ·         MTBTOs are effectively managing multiple translation teams at once, each focused on a particular tribal language. The only thing keeping them from deploying more teams is the lack of adequate funds to support them.
• ·         Far from being linguistic lightweights, project team leaders are capably parsing out original Greek texts while their companions do word-comparison studies in English, French, Lingala, Sango, or other existing Bible translations used by local populations.
• ·         Most often, teams are working at a common facility where they have ready access to electricity and V-Sat e-mail communications for their laptops. In the case of ACATBA, it’s in Bangui, capital of CAR. For ACOTBA-SUBO, it’s in Gemena, DRC, a major regional capital.
• ·         Teams regularly deploy on multi-week motorcycle safaris to check their translation work against the vernacular of local people throughout their target region. These visits take them to some of the most remote villages in all of Africa.
• ·         Far from being out of the loop, Western translation experts consult with each team to provide essential theological and linguistic accuracy for final drafts. At times, this interaction occurs during a two-week on-site workshop, but more and more it is happening via e-mail links that connect folks in real time across the globe. 

Main base for "mother tongue" translators in Gemena, DRC

As if this isn’t impressive enough, I also learned that these MTBTOs are thinking more and more about the need for sociolinguistic evaluation and research teams to determine how the changing dynamics of a particular tribal people might affect a translation project. Wycliffe/SIL veterans may have determined various translation projects as priorities ten or twenty years ago, but these projects have hardly remained static. Intermarriage, economic upheaval, and even rebel activity have totally changed, in some cases,  the dynamics of the languages people are currently using in a given area. ACATBA’s director, Bertin, explained, “We don’t want to plug away on a language project, only to find we have completed a New Testament for a language people really don’t use anymore.” ACOTBA-SUBO’s leader, Bolobo, alternatively suggested that smart, aggressive efforts of biblical exposure and literacy training with a local population can actually help preserve a mother tongue.

All of this has added a completely new dimension to the value of helping to bolster the organizational capacity of these worthy, national Bible-translation entities. After hours spent with each leader discussing (in French) everything from board governance and job performance review methods to efficient facilities management, I am returning home with a long list of potential ways friends and volunteers from America could come alongside these partners to make them even more effective and accelerate their strategic role of bringing God’s Word to the people of their countries.

Anyone interested in learning more?