It takes the body of Christ to reach a lost world and build disciples in every language
Have you ever been asked a question that caught you completely flat-footed? One that made you rethink how clever and smart you were, and come to realize that you weren’t as all put together as you thought?
It happened to me a few months ago. A little back story and you’ll understand.
My church was hosting their annual missions conference back in February. For the first time I had decided to take time off work and go. I was looking for a nice spiritual “kick in the butt”.
The church has some church planting partners in Nicaragua. Two pastor couples from that Central America country were also coming to the conference. And since my kids are all out of the house, we had a couple bedrooms available.
You can see where this is going, right?
It was actually quite a miracle. The first day of the conference we stood around my kitchen and got to know each other while preparing breakfast. They had varying levels of english language skill. I had almost no Spanish skill. So it was a classic “translator” scenario.
I learned about their church plants and how they were reaching their communities for Christ. They learned about my work and the books I write.
This struck a nerve.
They told me that they struggle to get good discipleship materials. So much is written in English. But many of their congregants don’t speak or read English.
When I shared my editorial plan for the year, the books I wanted to write and the online courses I wanted to create, they nodded along. But I wasn’t connecting with them. I could tell that they really didn’t care about what I planned to do.
Finally, one of the pastors, who didn’t really speak much English blurted out “How come you haven’t done anything in Spanish?”
The question completely caught me off guard. In my author circles I am aware of translation work. But I had never seriously thought about it.
But listening to them talk about discipleship, I realized this was a big deal. That they were working without resources. That they had to develop everything on their own to minister to those who wanted to grow in faith.
The question made me tear up. I could hear some frustration in the question. They knew the absolute wealth of materials in English. But they were struggling to find what they needed for effective discipleship in Spanish.
But this is how God works. He had just laid the foundation for a Dennis Double Whammy.
The question planted the seed.
Later that night, when we got back from the conference, I asked them how they liked everything (it was all in English, and one of the wives spent all her time translating for the others). They nodded and said it was very good.
I don’t know what possessed me to ask the next question. I didn’t realize that I was actually setting myself up.
“Did you understand the songs we sang?” They were all (English) worship songs. And I assumed that they were not ones that would have been sung in Nicaragua.
Again they nodded. But when I asked if it would help if I translated them, they lit up with fresh smiles. Yes. That would be wonderful. I said I would get the lyrics and run them through Google Translate for them.
Once again one of the wives told me about another service that did translations which handled Spanish better than Google. It was their go-to for language translation.
The next morning I got up early and downloaded the lyrics for the songs that we would sing that day. DeepL (that’s the name of the service) made it really easy to make translations. It even maintained the lyric format.
So I handed them a half dozen pages of English/Spanish worship songs as we headed out. They were excited. And when we started singing later that morning, they huddled around the sheets of paper using the flashlight from a cell phone to read the words in their mother tongue.
Oof.
What an impact.
And I still couldn’t get the original question out of my head. “How come you haven’t done anything in Spanish?”
Do you see God at work here?
I felt it.
Before they left, we had another conversation about Spanish translations and I told them I’d convert some of my books and send them the manuscript for review. The AI translation engine does a good job, but not a perfect job. It still needs someone to smooth out the rough edges.
It took me 3 months to feel brave enough to take the plunge. I kept thinking “I’ll get around to it.” I wasn’t quite ready. Whose hand do you see in that?
Last week I finally took action. I re-edited Getting To Know God’s Word and ran it through the DeepL translation and shipped it off to the pastors for review. It wasn’t hard. It just took time. I scheduled a vacation day and blasted through it over a weekend and a Monday.
I plan to print as many copies as they want and ship them down to Nicaragua as a way of saying thanks.
Thanks for helping with the translation.
Thanks for being such faithful servants of Jesus in their country.
Thanks for giving me such a boot in the butt to get out of my comfort zone and back into ministry.
Will you pray for them? Pray that they find the manuscript helpful. That they can make the changes that the translation needs and that I will be prompt about the whole publishing part of the equation.
To make it more personal, their names are Arnold, Beatriz, Edwin & Eslie.
Thank you. I know that I have sold books (in English) all over the world. I never thought about what impact it would be to pursue other languages.
Just when we start to feel good about ourselves, God opens up our eyes to see a much bigger and broader world. We aren’t bigger than He is. We aren’t cleverer. We don’t have it figured out as much as w think we might.
But then He turns around and asks us to be His hands and feet. And we go from embarrassed to engaged.
That’s my story this week. It’s about engaging in God’s work in a fresh new way.
Humble & Grateful.
Dennis
PS? There’s an action here for you too. How could you step outside of your comfort zone to impact someone for Jesus? Would it be buying someone their own copy of God’s Word? How about giving them a book to challenge their faith? How about doing that and agreeing to read through it with them and discuss it to help them understand?
There is no such thing as “I’ve done enough.” If you can challenge yourself for more, then more is what you ought to go do.
That’s the lesson I learned the hard way. Learn from my lesson.
D
