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Why Our Goal Isn't Producing New Testaments & Bibles

In SIL you would have thought our ultimate goal is to produce New Testaments and Bibles (not necessarily in that order), but that is not so. If the outcome you write up in your plan is 'members of the language communities are actively involved in producing appropriate high quality Scriptures and Scripture products and increasingly own the process of making them available', as it is in one SIL group, then although that may look good to funders and supporting churches, it isn't necessarily what's needed. The end (ultimate goal) of translation is transformed communities/lives, therefore we need to merge Scripture engagement and translation into one outcome, which would be something like:

'Through engagement with available and accessible Scripture products and Scripture-based products, communities are internalising the good news and demonstrating it in their daily lives.'

The actual work of Bible translation leads to that outcome. Therefore translation teams and Scripture engagement workers need to work closely together and make sure they are reaching the same goal. If we separate the work too much into silos or departments we end up with translation work that doesn't achieve the ultimate goal of transformed lives. Books sit on shelves. Audio recordings get filed on hard drives. Nobody is reading/listening/engaging with them. That's not what we want! Yet it happens, as teams are busy and tend to focus on 'getting the job done', without spending time thinking through what the job actually is.

By 'communities' we talking about people groups, or gatherings of believers, depending on the context. In some communities only a minority of the group are believers, so the latter (gatherings of believers) would be in focus, perhaps. Though not necessarily! Often the believers in these gatherings primarily want products they can use for outreach. So then the 'community' we are talking about is the wider, non-believing* community. That really does bring in the need for Scripture engagement!

*Non-believing in Jesus as Messiah, that is. They might believe he is a prophet, or something else.
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