Global 'food' shortage - a solution for shortage of God's Word!

In the past I have always been keen to possess the latest translation of the Bible in modern-day English for use in groups or when reading lessons in church, believing that by keeping up-to-date in this way I would be able to improve my communication of the Good News.

A recent post on http://wycliffe.uk/blog has, however, pulled me up short. How selfish, how greedy I now feel when I look first at my collection of such translations and then out across the world to see how many people there are who still have no portion of the Bible in their heart language. Yes, I've been concerned about this for some time - enough to spend much of my spare time in sight checking translations of parts of the Bible in various languages. But this post on the Wycliffe blog was a real body blow! This had never occurred to me, and it is surely just as bad as our food consummation in the midst of a global food shortage! Just read the post by Mark, drawing attention to the following written by Phil on christianbookshopsblog.org.uk -



"As I write this I’m looking through a flyer from Wycliffe Bible Translators promoting their Vision 2025 initiative. It’s a wonderful vision, to have a Bible translation programme underway in every remaining language that does not yet have the Bible available, and to have this in place by 2025. According to Wycliffe, there are 6,912 languages currently spoken in the world: of these, 2,251 — representing 193 million people — do not yet have the Bible available. And yet here in the English speaking world we not only have so many different translations that we now need other books to help us choose between them, but we seem to have either another translation or another super-duper hip-hop trendy hot-water-bottle-wrapped must-have fashion accessory edition published every week.

Why?

I put it to you that if a fraction of the creative energy that’s put into hyping up the Bible for English language speakers and readers went into translation programmes, Vision 2025 could be realised by 2012 if not sooner — and what a gift that would be to the world, far greater than Britain hosting the Olympics will ever be!"