WORKING HERE …….. HELPING THERE with Wycliffe Associates!

At a recent Wednesday afternoon service at my church, I used slides of Vision 2025, the aim of Wycliffe Bible Translators (htp://www.wycliffe.org.uk) to provide at least a part of the Scriptures for every people group in their heart language by
2025. Unfortunately, a situation has arisen through natural wastage whereby the work is being held up for want of more proof readers. This is an important job where a sight check is made between the original paper copy and the keyboarded paper copy in order to find as many errors as possible so that we can correct them before it goes to print or on to the Internet. Below is an example for you to have a go to see if you can find all 17 errors in the keyboarded copy.

{Sorry! So far i have not managed to copy the Sight Checkers' Quiz in an acceptable form. I will keep trying, but if you are really interested, you can always ask for a sample from Wycliffe Associates.]


If you enjoyed that or found it a challenge, I would love to encourage you to think about volunteering as a Proof Reader. Please contact me if you are interested in helping Wycliffe Associates to get the scriptures ready for people groups all over the world who, as yet, don’t have a Bible or New Testament in their mother tongue or have an ancient translation that needs updating.

I have been proof reading for Wycliffe Associates for several years and find great joy in the knowledge that I am helping to spread the Good News. Do, please, consider if God is calling you to help in this way.

If you find this work too difficult and you still wish to help missionaries in their work, Wyclife Associates have groups of volunteers helping in all kinds of ways - so do find out if you are the one they are looking for to fill hundreds of volunteer vacancies.

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!"