Dr Barry Funnell tells us his story
Evangelicals know that God’s Word is relevant for every person on the earth.
We know the Bible as his instruction book for life, his story, and his love letter which reveals his great plan of salvation for all nations. We are all challenged by Jesus’ commission to go into all the world to make disciples of all nations, but are we still hiding God’s Word under a bushel?
Pastor’s son crashes
As the son of a pastor I had often heard the Word, but was not basing my life on it, nor was I sharing it with others. This reluctant ‘hiding it under a bushel’ changed in an instant for me when, 35 years ago, during a student prank, I fell through a skylight in a gym hall roof and broke my back! My life changed from able-bodied to disabled. I would never be able to walk again. I was only 19 years of age, and was well on my way to a bright future before me as a dentist. How could God allow this to happen?
As I lay in my hospital bed, God’s Word spoke very clearly to me from Luke 12.20, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.’ Although I had become a Christian at the age of nine, I realised I had not been willing to give my entire life and future to God. I had wanted to be in charge. I had wanted to become rich. I had not been willing to do whatever God wanted me to do.
Crying out to God
In that instant of conviction by God through his Word, I realised that my life did not belong to me and that one day I would have to give an account to God of what I had done with my life. Without hesitation I cried out to God to forgive me. I willingly and unreservedly committed myself to serving his purposes for my life. I determined that day that I would take God’s Word seriously and tell it to the world! I began to read it avidly and also to share it with others.
During the incredibly tough time of rehabilitation, God’s Word encouraged, comforted, corrected and refined me. It is aptly called a sword, or in this case, scalpel! (Ephesians 6.17) At one particularly difficult time I cried out to God about what would become of me and he directed me to my life’s calling in 2 Timothy 3.16-20. Become a man of God, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Missionary training
I completed my dental degree and went to a missionary training centre. There I was intrigued to learn about the ongoing need for Bible translation, and about an organisation founded in South Africa called The Word for the World Bible Translators. I can honestly say it blew my mind to hear that there are 7,000 languages being spoken each day in the world! I was sad to discover that fewer than 25% of world languages had a New Testament and fewer than 10% had a full Bible. Nearly half of the languages needing a Bible translation were in Africa, right on our doorstep. (I had grown up in apartheid South Africa, and was fairly ignorant about the rest of Africa.)
Billions need the Word
God reminded me of 2 Timothy 3.16: ‘All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching the truth…’ I had thought to become a man of God by immersing myself in Scripture. Now I realised that the billions of people speaking thousands of languages in this world will only become men and women of God when they can do the same. Romans 10.14 asks: ‘How can they hear unless the message is preached to them?’ I had found my bright future and started to train in Bible translation, joining The Word for the World (TWFTW) on graduation. I thought, ‘If I could help one people group to have God’s Word in their own language, my life’s work would be complete.’
Faith in a wheelchair
I went to Malawi, Central Africa, in 1991 (wheelchair-bound, but on the wings of faith) accompanied by my wife, Julia. There we trained a team of Sena speakers to translate the entire Bible for their own people. TWFTW believes that mother-tongue speakers are the experts in their language and so should be the primary translators of their language. Mother-tongue speakers produce the most meaningful and natural translations.
Within a record ten years, the entire Bible had been translated in a co-operative effort between TWFTW and the Bible Society of Malawi. Scripture portions and then the full New Testament were published during the following ten years. By 2006 the entire Bible was published by the Bible Society. TWFTW believes the whole Bible is essential for the true discipleship of the nations.
Tanzania
Thereafter, Julia and I embarked on a new chapter in Tanzania. In Malawi we had focussed all our expertise on one Bible translation project. In Tanzania TWFTW combined forces with Pioneer Bible Translators and initiated ten new projects, training and assisting the teams concurrently. All ten New Testaments were published in 2016 and work is progressing on the Old Testaments. A further eight translation projects are also making good progress now in Tanzania and a further two New Testaments are ready for publishing.
This story is echoed around the world in all the regions where TWFTW is working. The secret of the success TWFTW has enjoyed has been our innovative training programme, taking the training to where the projects are. We believe in empowering nationals to do the translation for their own people. We want local people to take ownership of the work early on. We train translators from several language groups at the same time in the countries where they work. Translators are also trained on-the-job over a period of four years, so they are acquiring more skills as they progress in their work.
Involved in the community
The local community is involved in checking the translations and in running the projects, which creates local ownership. We use experienced personnel to mentor less-experienced translation teams, which constantly improves the quality of our work.
We have developed an effective group checking method using highly-skilled consultants to check the translations for accuracy against the original biblical languages in readiness for publishing. We can check up to ten languages simultaneously by using the powerful Paratext (parallel text) computer translation tool. The teams involved in these group checking sessions all learn from each other as the verses are checked. They can implement good translation solutions and continue to improve the accuracy and quality of their translations based on the group genius. This method is economical and optimises the use of the consultants’ time, who share their expert knowledge to several teams simultaneously, rather than visiting them individually. I have had the privilege of checking English back translations with over 60 different language groups using this group checking method in several parts of the world. The Paratext tool can produce very accurate word-for-word back translations of the foreign language (which the consultant does not know), and the consultant can see if a particular verse has been translated accurately.
God’s daily help
The true foundation to the success of all we do is that God is our daily help. He is our inspiration. Our ambition is that he may be glorified not only in us and how we work, but in all the thousands upon thousands of people transformed through his Word and ‘thoroughly equipped for every good work’.
