By Anna Gouws

I am a Wycliffe Ambassador. In this capacity, I had the opportunity to speak at a large Dutch Reformed Church in Pretoria as part of their Witness Month program about Bible translation and the work Wycliffe South Africa (WSA) is doing.

It was a very interactive service and the children enjoyed participating in the conversation.

First, we talked about how many languages there are in the world – almost 7400, and in South Africa – not only the 12 official languages, but around 46 in total. To illustrate how biblical resources are centred mostly around a couple of prominent languages, I did a water bottle illustration. I called volunteers forward, each representing a language – like, English, Afrikaans, German, isiZulu, Kaaps, Kwedam, Ekoti, etc. I had a crate full of water bottles. The water bottles represented Bible translations. I handed them out according to the biblical resources found in each language. English, Afrikaans and German had many bottles, Zulu had some, and the other languages had one or no water bottles. I explained that there are about 3800 languages in the world with no portion of Scripture yet.

I explained that God created all of these languages and loves the sound of each one of them. He wants to speak to people in their own language. We read Revelation 7:9-10 – in the new heaven and new earth, there will be people from every nation, tribe, people, and language before God’s throne.

After sharing on how the translation movement currently works and the different role players involved, I ended with Romans 10:14-15:

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

Bible translation is one way to bring good news to people, but there are many ways to be a witness of the good news of Jesus Christ. We ended off by thinking of different ways that each of us can be ‘bringers of good news’ at work, in our families, and at school.

At the end of what they celebrated as Witness Month, the church had an exhibition where about twelve ministries were represented. We had a stall for WSA, with a map of southern Africa and information about the various projects WSA is involved in. There was also an interactive activity where we listed seven languages and the sentence “I love the Word of God” in each of the seven languages. People had to put the right language next to each sentence. We engaged with people on the important work of Bible translation and WSA’s role in the bigger movement.