Bible translation usually does not happen through the Church, but in spite of the Church

By Peter Schöffer (printer); William Tyndale – British Library Board, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10794227

This topic needs to begin with a quick review of Bible translation in church history, both ancient and more recent. Here are some anecdotes on how Bible translations came into existence:

• When Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin language, he was criticized by church leaders such as Augustine for using the Hebrew Bible as the source text, instead of the Septuagint Greek translation preferred by previous translators. The accusations against him included a charge of heresy.
• The church was so inflamed by John Wycliffe's work, including the translation of the Bible into English, that it decided to posthumously declare him an heretic and to burn his bones on the stake, as happened to his writings, too.
• The same happened to William Tyndale, whose Bible translation was burned by the church alongside with the translator, who had the misfortune to be alive until the day of his execution.
• Martin Luther was in protective custody, hiding from church persecution, when he made use of the opportunity of much spare time to translate the New Testament into German. Although the translation became an immediate bestseller with the German public, the church of his day tried to stifle its distribution. Secular authorities contributed to its success considerably, instead.
• Not quite 500 years after Luther, an Ethiopian monk approached the office of SIL Ethiopia to ask for support in making his dream come alive to see a translation of the Bible into his mother tongue, against the clear wish of his church. Through tireless work, the man eventually succeeded in drawing his church into this endeavor, and the New Testament was published a few years ago.
• The translation for another language spoken in Ethiopia was initiated by a high-school teacher from that language community, who was organizing the support needed for this translation and almost saw it through, dying before the New Testament was published some years ago.

What these situations have in common is not that the church active in these language communities was working against Bible translation (it didn't always), but that the initial impulse was coming from strongly motivated individuals who did what needed to be done to get a Bible translation underway. In most cases, the local church did not provide the initiative to get things moving, but at best it could be motivated to support the effort, if it didn't even take on a stance of resistance until the end.

There are counterexamples with the church initiating Bible translation efforts, such as the Church of England's commission for the so-called King-James Version in the early 17th century, or the Catholic authorization of the Einheitsübersetzung in 20th century Germany. These church-led efforts were usually not resulting in first translations for a language, but produced alternative versions or revisions to existing translations. When it comes to providing the impulse for translations into previously unreached languages, church history provides very few examples of the responsible church being in the forefront. Possibly the Gothic translation attributed to Ulfilas may serve as an exception, as he was the Bishop of the Goths in his days when he either translated the Bible himself or at least commissioned the work to a translation team. Other examples were several Scandinavian and Finnish translations happening at the time of the early reformation, which saw Bible translation as a defining element of the reformation movement.

So where do I want to go with all this church history? The current worldwide Bible translation movement shares a strong assumption that Bible translation can only be successful when the church is in the forefront of the action. Bible translation needs to happen through the church, and initiated by the church, or it shouldn't and won't happen at all. A large part of current Bible translation strategy is developed around that assumption.

Whether this assumption is correct or not, church history so far leaves very little room for the idea that this has always been the case. Indeed, up to this century, first Bible translations into previously unreached languages have happened in spite of the church, and not usually through the church.

There is, of course, the possibility that church history will not have the last word on this, and that we have reached a new era in which the church rises up to this task and becomes (or even has become) the true driving force in the 21st century Bible translation movement. If so, then indeed it would be prudent to center our strategies around this idea. I submit, though, that this optimism about a new era is quite misplaced, and that there isn't really a lot of evidence that presents the church in a new and much more active role.

What exactly is the church?

You may have noticed already that I didn't use the word church with a capital C, except when referring to a particular name of a specific church. The reason is that I find it very difficult to be clear about what I or others mean when we use the word "the Church". It could be understood in at least one of three different ways:

• The global church, probably the concept most deserving to be written with a capital C. This is the body of believers of which Christ is the Head and which has persevered over two millennia. Christ has given this Church the Great Commission of spreading his Kingdom to the ends of the earth. As we all know too well, this Church has functioned with very differing levels of vitality throughout history, and certainly with quite variable success in fulfilling the Great Commission. If we leave behind the idea of the organized Catholic Church that died at the latest 500 years ago, if not much earlier than that, then there is not much of a structure that we can turn to in order to determine the will of the Church, or to get it to act as a body in a matter such as Bible translation. Though the language of our pronouncements sounds as if it is this level of the global church that we have in mind as driving force of Bible translation, practically we tend to look elsewhere.
• The national church in a country where Bible translation takes place. This can be a fairly easily determined body such as the Church of England, or the Roman Catholic Church during the times of Tyndale or Luther. But nowadays most national church landscapes are rather complex and fragmented. Looking at the national church, we also have the same boundary issues that we'd have with the global church: which denomination or even confession should be counted as part of it? Do we accept Catholics, Orthodox (of many colors), New Apostolics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses to the table? All of these nowadays work with Bible translations. What about the countless independent churches in some countries, some of which come with rather colorful theologies? Practically, in most countries you can find denominations that are rather supportive of Bible translation, and others that are strongly opposed to it. Plus all the others who are mostly indifferent. If you now work with the two or three denominations that stand behind the idea, are you then indeed working with "the church" of the country?
• The local church of the geographic area into which the Bible is to be translated. Again, this could be a fairly clear-cut body of two or three congregations, or it could be a rather chaotic network of relationships that cut across the language community in many conflicting ways. Whoever was involved in working with local churches can probably confirm that very often they have vastly different interests compared to the national church congregations of which they are part. This can work for the best or for the worst of a translation project, and it is a territory where all people involved usually need to tread very carefully.

I see very little discussion of these various levels of what constitutes the church when Bible translation leaders and decision makers make their strong statements about the great role the church needs to play in Bible translation. In practice, negotiations of resourcing organizations happen with national churches, as they are always the first contact in a country. But it would be overly optimistic that whatever support or goodwill is found on that level will be found on the local level. On the other hand, it would be too pessimistic to assume that all is lost just because the national church congregation doesn't want to play ball. The local church may have a totally different idea. In any case, actions such as a submission of all Bible translation work in a country under a governance that is dominated by the national church may quickly lead to situations where the goals of the national church overrule the needs of Bible translation.

Another complicating factor when talking about "the Church" is that there are also the sending churches of the missionaries and even a growing number of financing churches who want to fund the global Bible translation effort in general. These are usually located continents away, but their contributions are crucial for the success of what happens in the language communities. At the same time, many of the ideas that currently undermine the quality of ongoing Bible translation projects are also developed by this "Western" expression of the Global church, given weight by the money they provide for translation under the condition that things are done according to the ideas of the donors.

What are the goals of the church?

Any church body, no matter on what level, has a number of goals and ends it needs to see through. When this church is well organized, it will have these goals written out in some foundational statement. Some such goals may be to provide a home and a community for the Christians of a specified geographic area, or of an ethnic community. It may be accompanied with a desire for good teaching according to clearly defined theological statements, and with a vision for a sustainable presence in terms of finances, personnel, services, buildings, training institutions and probably many things more. If we are dealing with a very far-sighted church, it will also have developed a vision for implementing the Great Commission, either locally or even with an outreach to other communities.

This needs to be contrasted with the goals and needs of Bible translation. Bible translation comes with a lot of needs in order to achieve a goal that is often not naturally on the list of priorities of an existing church. Any church reached its current state of existence under the current status quo of Bible translation. Particularly when the church is reasonably large there may be a majority of decisionmakers evaluating this status quo as actually quite okay, and any newly proposed translation would therefore have to be justified. Here a national church may quite heavily stand in the way of a Bible translation for minority communities. But also on the local level an existing church may not have much use for a new translation that will be seen as a complication to the co-existence of various linguistic groups in the same church service. Things have been going well without such a translation. Individual pastors or leaders may fear that their position of authority will be challenged, as they will lose any advantage that they had worked hard to achieve. There are many reasons for churches on all levels to be wary of any kind of Bible translation efforts, as they tend to be intruders in a situation that was previously seen as not needing them.

Add to that the many needs accompanying a translation, with a number of people working for many years on the product without being productive in other ways, the need to pay them, the need for people to learn to read and write in a different language, the need to adjust the way to do church services – it becomes clear that a Bible translation is not necessarily seen as a welcome proposal. This should explain some of the resistance that has been offered to Bible translation by the various churches in the course of church history. Unless the church is blessed with a body of decision makers having the most astonishingly clear vision for mission and for God's desire to be truly understood by all people, opposing Bible translation at first sight may be a totally rational and reasonable position.

Looking at the situations where a language community is truly unreached and therefore there is no local church to work with, the "church as driving force of Bible translation" then needs to default to the regional or even national level. Some churches indeed see the opportunity to fulfill the Great Commission in this way, but others may be less excited about this. Others still dream of mission as a way of imposing their own culture and language on this unreached group – yes, I did observe this attitude in places in Africa.

All this should make it clear that it is by no means the most natural idea for a church to become ardent supporters of Bible translation. Yes, we see churches where there is a strong desire to make translation happen, but any assumption that the future of Bible translation will from now on be best left in the hands of the global, national or local church is in my opinion wishful thinking. Even where there is support for Bible translation for a while, it is just as likely to wane when new people come in, or new situations arise, or just a few generations pass by. Churches that in the 17th century warmly welcomed the English King-James version, nowadays as the King-James-Only Movement strongly resist any new English translation. The Lutheran Churches of Germany, for which the use of the Luther translation was part of their DNA, for centuries did nothing to translate the Bible into other languages of Germany, such as Frisian, Sorbian or Romani.

For the past 15 years I observed that the global translation movement attempted to fabricate a stronger support of "the church" for Bible translation by injecting large amounts of money into the national and local churches. It is not surprising that the influx of previously unseen amounts of salaries, structural support and equipment which all are to be absorbed by the participating churches will lead to a quite favorable re-evaluation of the church's stance towards Bible translation for as long as these resources materialize. But there is not much reason to be optimistic that this will lead to a sustainable shift of priorities that will make these churches champions for Bible translation for the long-term future. There are also indications in many places that these large funds are spent in conjunction with strategies that attempt to complete translations in the shortest possible time, which quite often lead to results that will require a revision or even retranslation. It will need to be seen how strong the support of the local churches will remain once the funds and the implementing partners are gone, and the translation left behind does not live up to expectations.

What then is the role of the church? 

As in previous posts, I need to add a disclaimer here, this time to the effect that it is not my desire to sideline the church in Bible translation, so that it should not play a role, and that it shouldn't be a champion for it. Quite to the contrary, having the local and national church behind a project will be a huge advantage to it. The support of the church will make the work go smoother, it can assume and display ownership by contributing to the success of the translation, and it can help the translation to take root in the community. The closer the churches are involved, the better it will be for the project.

But the current Bible translation movement wants to go much further than just securing the support of the church for individual projects. It wants the church to take ownership of the translation movement as such, and therefore wants the locally active participants to submit themselves under the strategic leadership of the churches. This may take shape for example by having translation organizations locally governed by boards that consist of church leaders. In my experience, such locally rooted governance will inevitably bring the goals of Bible translation into competition with the goals and ends of the churches. If the boards are dominated by the churches, then the priorities of the churches will always win out, to the disadvantage of the goals of Bible translation. This is not because these church-representing governors are acting out of bad faith, but because they are pursuing the interests of the churches they represent. They are doing their job, and they should not be blamed for it. As a result, such boards normally agree that Bible Translation as such is desirable, but the many complex questions and processes that surround it are quickly forgotten or misunderstood, and decisions are made with incomplete information or based on unrealistic expectations.

The church is desperately needed for the success of Bible translation. The national and local churches are crucial players that can make or break a translation strategy or a project, so they need to be positively involved. But the job of church leaders is to make their churches reach their goals, and we Bible translation practitioners need to accept that our goals are not necessarily high on their priority lists. It is therefore not moving our goals ahead if we make these church leaders determine our goals. Bible translation will be more successful when its goals remain determined internally and then form the basis of contact, negotiation and interaction with the church on all levels. I pursue this thought further in the post on Bible translation and para-church organizations.

Bible translation is mission, and often needs missionaries

Mission Espada Tower.jpg. (2020, October 26). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved 09:18, May 22, 2026. 
By Travelinchase - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51801925 .

This is a bit of an off topic, as it doesn't touch so much on what Bible translators do. Rather, it is a little rant on how we talk about and advertise their work. The relevant background here is that in western countries the Bible translation organizations increasingly avoid the term mission, and even more often the term missionary. Although I understand where this attitude comes from, I am convinced that it is a mistake with self-defeating consequences for the Bible-translation movement.

Bad press for missionaries

It is certainly true that the days when missionaries were unquestioned heroes are irretrievably gone. And there are good reasons for that. Looking back over the past centuries of modern mission, there are just too many situations where missionaries confused the Good News of Jesus with the good news of the Western civilization. Too often they spread the divisions of their home churches instead of Christian unity; or they willingly served the interests of the colonial powers instead of those of the people that hosted them. Rather than helping the peoples they served to adopt Jesus into their culture, they forced them to adopt the missionaries' cultures in order to accept Jesus. They split ethnic groups into two or three to avoid disagreements between the different missions, and they resisted too long when local churches asked to be given more autonomy.

So yes, there is a lot that mission and missionaries can rightly be criticized for, and for a number of decades there has certainly been no shortage of critics. Among the atheists and agnostics of the Western world there was never any deep understanding for Christian mission. But even among Christians more and more questions have been asked about the methods and even the justification for mission.

New communication strategies

To counter this bad press today's mission agencies take steps to communicate in ways that deemphasize the fact that they are just that – mission agencies. This may appear somewhat disingenuous for traditional mission agencies with a focus on evangelization, who clearly realize that they have a branding problem when they no longer call themselves what they are. But for other agencies that come with a more specialized and non-evangelistic purpose statement the temptation is greater to present themselves as something that is seen as more benign in the 21st-century context. Bible translation agencies are among them.

I guess this is more of a problem in Europe than elsewhere, but there you can look at websites of Bible translation agencies and find the word "mission" only when it comes to the agency's mission statement. Otherwise you learn that you are looking at a "Christian organization" with an international focus, partnering with churches all over the world. The staff they hope to recruit are not missionaries, but "specialists", "experts", "intercultural workers" or more of that. The hope is that a coy pretense that the agency has not for decades called itself a mission, with missionaries running all over the place, may deflect some criticism from people who don't like missionaries, for the reasons stated above and for many more.

Confusing our audience

While not accomplishing its goal of tricking the critics, this communication strategy rather results in a confused target audience. Those who want to attack mission and the work of missionaries won't be fooled by a few changed words – they know why Bible translation is being done, and by whom, and they hate it, no matter what games we play with semantics. If any effect is measurable by this new way of presenting Bible translation, it is with the people that Bible translation agencies need to convince in Europe: the very long list of supporting churches and congregations, and the young people who are willing to invest their lives into God's kingdom. They will receive the following messages:

• "Thanks for supporting our hard work for so many years! Please continue to do so, even if we make it more difficult for you to justify our work to your mission committees, as, well, we are now in the business of partnering. And yes, we partner better than anybody else!"
• "Thanks also for supporting our wonderful staff! They are ever so dedicated intercultural workers, but they'd rather not be addressed by you as your missionaries any longer. I hope you don't mind that they still depend on a share of your congregation's missionary budget!"
• "Thanks for considering to join our exciting Bible translation movement and wanting to invest your life into God's kingdom. But a missionary you cannot become with us, although this has been your life's goal since you heard all these missionary tales in Sunday school. Grow up, and join our team of dedicated Christian international experts – or ask New Tribes if you really have to be a missionary!"

The trouble is that our target audience, for the most part, has not bought in to the idea that mission and missionaries are something shameful that needs to be brushed under the carpet. They still read the "Great Commission" in their Bible, they still don't flinch when they see the map of Paul's missionary journeys, they have missionary committees, and their teenagers still vow to each other that they will become missionaries as soon as they finish high school. But when they get to the point, they are faced with a crowded market of organizations of which the ones that could be most interesting to them act as if they were anything but mission. I'd certainly be confused.

Strategically, if we want more European recruits in Bible translation, we need to let them know what we are and what they join: a mission agency as missionaries, and that needs to be part of the branding, regardless of the raised eyebrows we will see in the faces of our detractors. These eyebrows have been up all the time and won't ever go down.

Bible translation is mission

This is the point that still needs to be made – that Bible translation in its nature cannot be seen as independent from mission. It is an integral part of it. This, of course, is not the case when another committee or individual sits down to produce the 37th translation of the Bible into the English or the German language. This is rather the activity of a church that in 500 years of history has understood Bible translation to be a valuable and necessary medium for the communication of the Christian faith. This kind of Bible translation is rarely about making new believers (there are exceptions to this, when the language of the translation targets a specific subgroup of society), but about making sure that the Christian message continues to be shared in effective ways among existing believers.

But the vast majority of Bible translation projects target languages that so far have no access to the Bible, or at least no good access. Almost always in such a situation there needs to be some external involvement to get the Bible going: somewhere between the advocates for the need, the people involved in translation, the people that train these people, the organizations that administer the project, and the people that finance it, you'll find outsiders to the language community, and for these this is an act of mission. Yes, there have been translations done entirely by, from, for and with the local community, but these normally go back to very strong and self-motivated individuals, and they are very few. The many hundreds of projects that have been started over the past two decades would for the most part have never happened if there hadn't been a strong and sometimes overwhelming outside impetus. This is mission, the desire of people from a different culture, a different language, to reach another linguistic group with the Word of God in order to advance God's Kingdom.

Likewise, the people who leave behind their original habitat to go to places where they can assist with creating such a Bible translation are missionaries. The donors and funders who generously provide their financial resources for this effort are mission supporters. These things need to be said clearly, as they provide much of the framework for some of the things I will have to say in other contributions: whenever somebody is motivated to invest their time, their thinking, their energy, their money, even their lives into another people group being reached by God's Word, then they are working to fulfill the Great Commission. An organization that engages in this work is a mission organization, and it helps its standing if it communicates this clearly to the potential supporters.

If, instead, the organization succumbs to the temptation to hide its true colors, it also contributes to a world in which less is said positively about mission and missionaries. A better strategy to countering the bad press is to come up with good stories about how missionaries in the 21st century have learned many lessons from the past and genuinely contribute to a better life and flourishing communities. Professional soldiers of our times are talked about with more respect than soldiers of the 17th century. Pastors and priests of our days are not any more associated with the poor show of the clergy of the middle ages. Doctors and medical practitioners enjoy a much higher standing than their colleagues from just a few hundred years ago. So there is no reason why we couldn't fill the notion of mission and missionaries with new life in our times, in a way that at least among our home churches the people develop a new excitement for the idea. And, as the examples of soldiers and clergy show, any improved trust can quickly be destroyed by misbehavior among the new breed of specimens. It requires hard work to keep it on high levels, so that future generations won't have to complain about the failures and mistakes of mission in our times.