PREVIOUSLY: Crowdsource the Translation For my last post in this series on The Seed Company, I’d like to turn my attention to the organization’s communication efforts. The Seed Company has a lofty goal to lead the way in Bible translation by promoting the utilization of technology and community-based translation cohorts to accelerate the work. They’ve also been extremely gracious in [...]

PREVIOUSLY: The Endangered Cultures List The Seed Company is the advance guard of scripture translation. Their strategy is specially designed to jump-start the process by finding nationals to lead the work and prioritizing the translation of certain passages. It’s quite remarkable, really. But there is more they could do to accelerate Bible translation. Historically, scripture translation has been done by [...]

PREVIOUSLY: The Words of the Word Advocating for literacy can be a PR problem for scripture translation agencies. You see, literacy campaigns within literate cultures are widely accepted as good things. But promoting literacy among pre-literate peoples (those who do not have a written language) can smack of imperialism. Combine that with efforts toward evangelization, and the general public can [...]

I admire the work of those who translate the scriptures into different languages. Indigenous church simply isn’t possible without a version of the Bible in the local language. Groups like Wycliffe Bible Translators  and The Seed Company mobilize translators around the world to produce reliable working translations of the Bible into the languages of the “unreached.” Their work assists missionaries [...]

Mission isn’t about the recipients, it’s about the Sender. Missiologist David Bosch wrote that mission should be defined in terms of its nature rather than its addressees. It’s true that Jesus spent a lot more time talking about Himself and His relationship to the Father than He did about the specifics of the people He came to save. In His [...]

Replace the nutrients and taste with preservatives and slick packaging, and you can get the general public to eat just about anything. Something about the convenience of it all made frozen and dehydrated “prepared meals” commonplace in Western homes. After a couple generations raised on ready-made meals, obesity has become a first-world epidemic, and cooking actual food is something of [...]

I notice street signs. Yes, all motorists are supposed to “notice” the signs that direct the flow of traffic, warn of possible danger, and inform us about our location. But I notice them because I’m a communication geek. Did you know that the United States Interstate Highway system has its own typographical font? It’s called “Highway Gothic,” and it was [...]

Imagine that you move to a far-off place to live among a tribe of people of a culture very different from the one you grew up in. Here, you’re truly a fish out of water. They do everything differently here, and you don’t like it one bit.”Things are much better back home,” you complain. “Why can’t they just do it [...]

In my last post regarding the Anthropological approach to mission, I proposed that the church should replace its task-oriented view of mission with an identity-based one. One thing I failed to do there was explain what, exactly, an identity-based missiology would look like. Mission is not something we do, it’s something we are. The concept of mission is rooted in [...]

The concept of unreached people groups is a helpful way for Christians to organize their efforts toward global disciple-making. Around the world, people group themselves along certain lines- lines that also present significant obstacles to the spread of the gospel from one group to another. Ethnography, the practice of studying and categorizing groups of people, provides the mission with a [...]