The world is fast, and churches can easily feel overwhelmed by accelerating changes in what looks like every arena. The church, however, is not something dead that is carried along with cultural currents. Rather, now as in every age, the church has the vitality needed to not only stand against the stream, but even to navigate its chaos. Even as technological advances threaten us with new encroachments of sin into our routine, they also are being harnessed by the people of God to grow the kingdom in ways that produce real impact in our here and now.
Earlier this summer, Wycliffe Bible Translators announced that they have launched the whole Bible in its 800th complete translation (https://wycliffe.org.uk/blog/story/time-to-celebrate/). With this milestone, there are now 6.2 billion people worldwide who are able to read the whole Bible in their heart language, the language with which they grew up and the language in which they can see and know the truth most fully.
For centuries of church history, reading and knowing the Bible meant that members of “outsider” language groups would mean learning a second or even a third language. But in recent years, new translation efforts have exploded in productivity. In fact, it was only in 1998 that the 400th whole Bible translation was celebrated (https://billygraham.org/decision-magazine/articles/bible-translation-hits-landmark-800th-language-mark). Yes, you read that correctly: it took almost 2000 years for the Bible to be fully translated into 400 languages, but in the just under 30 years since, that number has doubled. In fact, according to Wycliffe, the rate at which new languages were engaged in May 2019 to May 2021 was once per 5 days. But by May 2021 to May 2023, the rate had spiked to once every 30 hours. And today, it stands at an almost unbelievable rate of once per 17 hours (https://www.wycliffe.org/blog/vision-2025-then-and-now)!
And that’s not all. That 800 is only for whole Bible translations; New Testament-only and other partial translation initiatives are also continuing to accelerate. As the rate continues to increase across all forms of Bible translation, goals that seemed like they would take a miracle back at the turn of the millennium are seeing that miracle enacted for the glory of God to the nations. Over the course of our lifetimes, we continue to see the growth of the ways in which the truth of the Bible is coming to be known among not only every tribe, but every tongue as well.
Not only that, but translations are growing in accessibility, with ai-powered motion capture technology now being used for the good of the kingdom to bring the Bible to deaf communities (https://www.wycliffe.org/chameleon). In much the same way that new language groups can now hear the whole Bible in their heart language, these advances allow deaf communities to have the Bible presented to them in a way that is deeply familiar, allowing a new directness to them for the truth of Scripture.
Make no mistake, there is still plenty of work left to be done in the field of Bible translation. The American Bible Society estimates that there are still 1.5 billion people across more than 3,000 language groups that are still waiting for a whole Bible in their heart language (https://www.americanbible.org/translation/). But their wait is definitely not in vain and the date they hope for seems to keep growing faster and faster on the horizon.
