Thanks for your comment and for your prayers for these groups. God is at work. The idea of focusing on these small groups actually begn with one individual who had the same vision and desire you have. You might also find the earlier article “Which book of the Bible do you translate first” encouraging because of your knowledge of CD principles. See the further reading link above.
Gilles

This is such an eyeopener. I’ve been praying for the unreached to become God’s adopted children for awhile now, which is such a joy. The Lord continues to bring to my heart His heart for the least of these, with even deeper meaning from your article. I’ve also been involved in community development and read quite a few articles (and experienced) to be concerned how we can hurt the poor or poor in spirit (and ourselves) if we do too much for them. The smarter strategy you discuss allows just this, that with the joy of the Gospel as it grows in pieces through storytelling, will grow in such a passion in the people receiving it to help it grow and nurture and bring it to other peoples around them…Then their planting will have a long-lasting great harvest and we would still be so privileged to be partners with them. Blessings to you, Cathy

Thanks for your comments and affirmation. What you describe is indeed happening with the larger groups. We’ve call these “initial goal” projects. Then when the community decides what they’d like to translate next, they move to an “intermediate” goal project. Now some of those groups are finishing the full New Testament. It’s the sort of local ownership and planning that makes the translation their own rather than one done for them. it makes sense that this approach would be used for the smaller, more isolated, groups, too.

This approach has lots of advantages. If one is putting expensive expatriate human resources into a project for 10-20 years, then significant survey is needed to justify that. This approach allows less initial research, but then the evaluations would include some research, so that research and evaluation would inform choices all along the way. This approach is very adapted to working with language communities where there is a high rate of change – common among the “least”.

I could write a lot more about the advantages, but this is probably already too much for a comment on a blog.