Scripture Engagement

When discussing Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions of Scripture Engagement , it's common for people in the Bible translation world to say, 'That's one of those conditions we can't do anything about.' Unfortunately there are a couple of these: Condition 6: Spiritual Hunger Condition 7: Freedom to Commit to the Christian Faith Actually it's not true. Let's have a look at how these can be addressed by teams. Condition 6 can be addressed by looking at the felt needs of the community, and by contextualisation. Condition 7 can be addressed by contextualisation. So... Felt Needs Sometimes a community will have various struggles to do with finance or health or their collective self esteem. These can be addressed biblically, which means coming up with Kingdom goals or biblical values to replace those that are unhelpful. I heard of one community where they were continually hungry, because they could not produce enough rice to feed themselves. Developers came in and help...

We are used to talking about Bible translation in terms of communication. Missiologists talk often talk about 'bridges' used for sharing the good news, which is also a communication metaphor - we have something we want to communicate, but we need a bridge, a way of expressing it, some kind of packaging for it, so that it communicates correctly (or hides whats inside the package, if we interpret the metaphor literally). This is a misunderstanding for two reasons: It is a false assumption that we have 'correctly' understood the good news. Unfortunately we have only understood a representation of the good news for our own culture . It doesn't matter how we package it, this will be misunderstood or irrelevant to the receptor culture (the primary audience in question). For instance, those in the minority world often explain the good news in terms of our guilt before a just God who has to punish sin, and that He, in Christ, took that punishment on our behalf to make us...

You might have heard of Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions for Scripture Engagement . How can an analysis of a project be carried out? The simplest way is to use these online Google forms . Here are the steps: Get your team and partners together. Have someone teach Wayne Dye's Eight Conditions (or ask everyone to read it beforehand in the LWC) Fill in the first form. Give the condition an overall rating out of five. Five is high, one is low. Fill in the second to eighth forms and give them ratings. Work out which conditions have the lowest ratings. Start working to try and bring those conditions up. Work out a Scripture Engagement strategy for that people and adapt your project accordingly. For ease of use I've posted the links to the forms below, with some instructions: The Eight Conditions Questionnaire in Eight Parts The Eight Conditions questionnaire is now online in eight separate parts so you can answers short questionnaires on just one condition at a ti...