In 2004 an amazing feast was prepared for the Gofa community in Ethiopia. For the first time, they could feast on God’s Word in Gofa — a language spoken by 233,000 people. Gofa translators had just completed the Gospel of Luke, plus the “JESUS” film dubbed in the Gofa language.
Now, eight years later, we returned wanting to discover: Had they been nourished? In other words, had their lives been transformed because of the Gofa Scriptures?
1. We sought to identify key areas of life and culture transformation.
To discover life transformation, we knew we’d have to go beyond documenting church statistics: church attendance, baptisms, conversions. True, such information was nearly at our fingertips. As a result of years of missionary work, many established churches now existed in the Gafo community.
But as outsiders, we were lacking a holistic picture. That is, we really didn’t know which areas of their lives and culture had been most affected by the translation. So we’d probe deeper, looking for patterns. This list covers some key areas infected by sin across cultures:
- Causality: How do they explain death, sickness, weather, famine, war?
- Relationships: How do they interact with family, extended kin, neighbors and cultural outsiders?
- Social Networks: How do they behave in social networks designed to further economic and religious goals?
- Time/Purpose: How do they understand time? Is it cyclical? Linear? Is their purpose for living clear or unclear?
- Rituals: Do their rituals contribute to the health of their relationships with God and each other?
- Forms of Power: How do they distribute power in the family, church, tribe, government and business? How do they resolve conflicts?
For true and lasting transformation, only the Word of God can empower people to overcome these areas of dysfunction.
2. We engaged in open dialogue to reveal areas of spiritual transformation.
Our method was not simply to interview people, following a formal scientific questionnaire. Rather, we developed sets of opening questions that hopefully would lead into deeper dialogue. Each insightful comment is followed by another question, and so on. Capturing the interviews on video allowed us to transcribe the recordings and identify themes later on.
Of course, we wanted the broadest and richest sample possible. So we applied the dialogue method to a cross-section of Gofa society: women, business people, government workers, teachers, farmers and pastors. As you can imagine, the sample provided a lot of detailed feedback, but patterns did emerge.
3. We discovered greatest spiritual impact in 3 key areas because of the Gofa Scriptures.
Of all the culture categories listed, three areas stood out as having greater spiritual impact.
The broadest impact was on time and purpose. The majority of people expressed a greater sense of God’s care in this life, the dignity of each individual created by God, and the need to place greater priority on spiritual things now.
Next were relationships. The Gofa translation helped people understand the importance of sharing Christ with friends, neighbors and family. And they began to value husband and wife relationships in a whole new light.
The third was social networks. They understood that integrating biblical principles into business dealings was part of living out Christ’s teaching within their community and with their neighbors. Practicing integrity, even among nonbelievers, was a new value for many of those interviewed.
Other findings showed that people were taking Scripture more seriously now that it was in their language. Engaging with the Gofa Scriptures meant they were now challenging traditional, syncretistic beliefs that had once remained unchallenged — when only the national language Bible had been available.
Finally, one last area of spiritual transformation took us by surprise. But for that, stay tuned. To be continued ….
The Gafo community dedicated their New Testament June 11, 2012. Now Gofa translators are finishing the Old Testament translation, scheduled for publication in 2013.
Further reading:
Free Download: Discover Spiritual Impact for 21st Century Mission
How Would You Measure Spiritual Impact?
On Social Transformation and Unreached Peoples
Which Book of the Bible Do You Translate First?
I am SO looking forward to the continuation of this! Keep it coming.
I love the methodology. The Spirit blows where he wills, so methodology for measuring impact has to be open to all the options. Great job!
I also love the fact that this was done eight years after the completion of the NT. I hope that this signals a trend of paying attention to what is happening well after the “project” is completed. I note that OT translation is ongoing. I hope that evaluation is done in cases where translation has ceased, even where the whole Bible is complete.
Gillis, I do appreciate your approach — realistic and wholesome. In my work in Leader-led Movements, where we seek to help influential leaders live out their calling, we too have similar findings in the three areas you summarized.
1. As an individual when it becomes clear that God cares about all that one does, then ALL of life takes on greater meaning; it is part of God’s kingdom growing and redeeming the world with Christ.
2. Likewise, being made in the image of a triune God, enjoying community is both supporting and enjoyable.
3. Finally, finding coherence in life at work, where most people spend most of their time, is so critical — both to personal life as God intended and to the extension of God’s grace to all around us.
Thank you for your great work.
Great post, Gilles! And great teaser… I’ll look forward to the follow-up…
Thanks for sharing this report – it was a lot of work! But obviously worth it, and helps reconfirm that translation of God’s Word into one’s heart language and cultural milieu makes qualitative and quantitative differences in the accessibility of the message.
I’m intrigued by a number of things you mention … and had some thoughts on them.
I appreciate the interview method you used. I was wondering, though, who the “we” is … was it all linguists? Translators? Any cross-cultural church planters, disciplers/mentors, or other types of workers? I guess the larger question is, What combination of different spiritually-gifted people and/or professional skill sets would make the best R&D team for a follow-up project like this? (Although, I’m certainly partial to linguists being prominent, as we’re typically not just about learning languages, but discerning patterns!)
I’m also intrigued by the set of six clusters of issues you were looking at. Seems to me that most deal with very practical, concrete aspects of relationships and how people lived out their everyday lives. But the questions about causality and time had a lot more abstract edge to them. Not that these are unimportant. In fact, in my work on paradigm analysis, such abstractions in the ways we process are so deep that they affect *everything* else – values, beliefs, organizational systems, cultural behaviors and lifestyles.
Beyond those observations, I’m curious if this set of six is what you would suggest using anywhere in the world, or did you pre-customize them for this particular culture? I’m particularly interested in the causality cluster … if the background Gofa culture is at all animistic and relatively fear/power-based, I’d wonder if anything else could change much unless there was a radical change in the view of what powers cause things. But it’s just as important, I think, in a Western culture where hyper-rationalism denies any personal sources of causality. Something like that has so much to do with *why* things are the way they are – and that cannot be understood without God’s revelation to us of things unseen – that it’s a game-changer in *any* culture. It changes the paradigm for everything, not just the relationships or rules for some things.
Regardless of whether I’m close on that point or not, I’d be interested in what those who work on missional metrics think in general about whether a culture can have a key issue around which all else may turn.
So, there are some initial thoughts, and thanks again for posting this! Look forward to the next installment …
Brad Sargent
Brad,
Those are good observations and questions. The “we” in this case could simply be viewed as our organization. Because donor’s invest their funds for spiritual results, trainers work hard to equip the translators and their community to do translation, others prayer, and yes, the linguists work to help develop the language, all of these parties are interested in knowing if their involvement makes a significant difference. In this case, we intentionally asked an outside agency to apply the experiment so that some third-party help could provide something of an objective analysis. Our next attempt will be to have our field staff apply the method in a few other places. But I’ll save that for the next post.
The list of six areas of impact you asked about is not exhaustive, of course. I have not seen that list used by others. It stems from our experience in observing and learning about what cultures struggle with and how Scripture should even target areas of greatest tension at first. It could be applied anywhere in the world, and we do wonder what other areas of impact would emerge as most significant in a different culture.
Thanks for your comments!
This is good stuff, well done guys. Did you do any comparisons of your work with the research that Joel Trudell did in Cameroon? It would be fascinating to see how it all compares.
Eddie,
Thanks for your encouragement. Yes, we are aware of Joel’s work along the same lines. His key question is, “does reflecting on Scripture make a difference, individually or socially?” It’s good to see others looking for evidence of spiritual impact from Scripture translation in the heart language.
Why does Wyc/SIL and even TSC refuse to count conversions?
John,
Thanks for reading and commenting. Counting conversations is certainly still a valid way to measure impact from Bible translation. Church planting missions have counted conversions for years and, I assume, they will continue to. In addition to conversions, The Seed Company is also deeply interested in knowing what happens in peoples’ life after they convert because of having Scriptures in their language. It costs a lot of time and money to do Bible translation. We want to know how effective all of that work is.