Using the Scriptures in a Digital Age

Cameroon Culture, Church, Linguistics, Missiology,

As we think about Bible translation, and how to facilitate the impact of the scriptures in the worldwide church, it’s interesting to consider the impact of recent technology. Many Americans show up to church on Sunday morning without a printed Bible (I have observed). Whatever you think of that, it constitutes a change of culture and practice, which is driven (at least) my the fact that you can store a whole, searchable Bible in no more space or weight than you already carry with your phone.

How does this impact the worldwide church? Others noted at least a decade ago that in Africa, cellular technology leapfrogged over land line telephones. That is, while I grew up learning to use a phone that was permanently attached to a wall in our house, many Africans (that I know) have cell phones, never having seen a land line telephone. I have seen cell towers in the rainforest in DR Congo, where no one would ever consider laying down wires for telephones.

In a similar way, I know people here with access to the scriptures on an Android app (as in the above picture, from church this morning), but this week I saw my first print new testament in this language –in my third workshop with this group! They are working on the old testament, having had the new testament since 1988 (if I have my facts correct; this at least sounds right).

So are people printing Bibles? And are they buying and selling them? Why would they, when installing an app on the phone they already have costs so much less in money, volume and weight? I’m not saying this is the best for the long term health of the church, but it is certainly a reality that we must consider –people may be leapfrogging over the printed scriptures, to access them digitally without ever having used them in print.

The pic above is obscure, because it was taken inside the church. For those interested in seeing more of my friend Paul, here’s another picture taken outside:

If you’re wondering why I’m working in a language that already has a new testament, this is one of a number of languages which was found to have problems with the writing system. Tone studies have come a long way since this work was done (50+yrs ago), as have writing system development studies.

So people are hoping we can come up with a way to write tone which will work better for these guys and enable more fluent reading, giving more powerful and effective scriptures.

Which brings us back full circle: how can you think of making changes to the writing system after printing your scriptures? That would be very cost prohibitive –in print. But electronically, you just put in the changes and update the app, and move on…

I personally think there should always be a place for written, printed scriptures, if only to archive them in a format that doesn’t die with electricity –or time. But for many use cases, Android makes a lot of sense, at least in the eyes of many here. So I think it’s wise to consider how to make the most of it.

POSTLOG: after reading the above, Paul informed me that his phone battery died just after I took the above picture –a risk not present in printed Bibles.

The Relativity of plumbing

Cameroon Culture, Family, Travels, ,

This is a post for my engineer friends. I took a shower this morning for the first time in days, because couldn’t figure this thing out.

This is my second stay in this compound; before I stayed in a flat that had a nice hot water system, I think from a tank on the roof, which was basically just heated by the sun. So my expectations (from here and elsewhere) led me to think that the left knob was hot.

This was further reinforced by the fact that it has special plumbing, going straight up. The right knob connects to the toilet and sink, and to another spiget off to the left –classic cold water plumbing.

Turning on the left knob, you get low pressure –still not uncommon for local hot water. But turning in the right at the same time (to mix hot and cold), the pressure guess funky, weird noises clank, and very soon there are sounds of spraying outside, like there’s a leak somewhere. Turn off the right knob, and it stops –so I did.

But the left knob by itself is just enough pressure to be disappointed, not really to shower. So I gave up, and got to work on other things, like analysing tone.

Later I noticed that there was no plumbing to a tank on the roof, as I had expected, so the left knob was coming from the attic, not a solar tank on the roof. If that was the case, then the hose spilling water in the ground should be the overflow for that tank.

So…. <drumroll\> if the right knob was causing overflow of the attic tank, then it should be that the left knob wasn’t hot, but rather attic water, and the right knob was city water.

This kind of system is important where water is scarce, and where city water cuts off a lot. That is, use the right (city water) knob most of the time, and when it doen’t work, turn it off and use the left (attic water) knob. Then when city water comes back on, open both knobs and fill the tank in the attic (just until you hear the overflow spilling out the window).

So once I figured out that normal usage was just using the right knob, I got decent pressure. Heat would have been nice, but it’s hot enough here that cold water wasn’t really a problem. And it was nice to finally figure out how to shower. 🤪

2022

Family, , 

It has obviously been too long since we have blogged (8 months of silence here is likely a record for us). So what has gone unrecorded in 2022? 
In January, James navigated passports, visas and international airports on his own for the first time to spend a month at Christmas with us. 

In February, we all helped our Cameroonian church throw a huge wedding celebration for good friends Yvan and Chella. Then Kim got her third round of COVID and following viruses that felt much like long-COVID. We would not learn for another 6 months that faulty thyroid medication was part of the chronic sickness that happened for months on end.

In March, Kent flew off to Kenya to present his orthography methods at a worldwide conference, and stay another 3 weeks to help 3 langauges from 3 other African countries specifically with their tone studies. He was back in the same neighborhood where we lived as newlyweds in 1999-2000. It was fun to see how much had changed in that time! He also enjoyed worship and fellowship with our two best Kenyan friends, who are still like family to us. We also got news that Kim's brother got engaged!

In April & May, Kim was balancing subbing, occasional Literacy work, and homeschooling Anna as she finished her first year of high school and Joel finished his first 'college-level' course online. Kent completed the next stage of development on AZT software adding functions to sort vowels and consonants, as well as tone!

In June, we helped several colleagues pack up to leave or move back to the US/Canada. Then we treated ourselves to a week in Istanbul - the most international city any of us have ever visited! Istanbul was a wonderful halfway point between Anna studying World Geography and Ancient History, and we all enjoyed ourselves.

In July, we landed back in Texas one hour before the Fireworks shows began on the 4th. James picked us up at the airport for a change, and God orchestrated so beautifully a donated home for us to stay all together, and cars to drive for a few weeks. We got to catch up with what He is doing in our home church there, visit with many partners, eat lots of ice cream, berries and Chic-Fil-A. We managed to fit in doctors, dentist, orthodontist, 2 driver's permits, a week with Kim's parents and a week of violin camp too. James showed us his life in Austin, and we left him there to spend a week of ministry to freshman college guys at UT. 

And now August is wrapping up! We flew back August 3rd. God managed to line up our two airplanes next to each other, the incoming flight from the US and the outgoing flight to Cameroon were next door to each other! We landed 2 hours late, walked off one gangway, turned around and walked right on the last boarding call! We had our feet on airport tiles for about 5 minutes! That has never happened to us in hundreds of flights! God knew we had a deadline and needed to get home to Cameroon before Kim's paperwork expired the next day. He's so good!



We've got our house up and running for the year, Kent is back in his office, and Joel has started his senior year back at RFIS, where Kim serves on the school board. This week we celebrated a second church wedding with our local church family, and our front yard flowers have become the hot place to get photos taken. Anna is loving her Advanced Chemistry class the best so far, and Kent is traveling out to a workshop soon. I'll save that for the September news!

Missionary Construction

Anthropology, Commentary, Computing, Family, Linguistics, , ,

I’m not sure if missionary construction is more or less well known than missionary linguistics, but they are likely both a bit of a mashup for most people. I took this picture on my way home last week (stuck in holiday traffic, plenty of time to get the shot…) as one of a series of vehicular graveyards I’ve seen across the decades almost everywhere I go in Africa. Typically, it makes me think of how things fall apart here, and how little people probably expected this outcome to whatever they started out doing.

But today I’m reading one of my favorite missionary biographies, “To the Golden Shore”, by Courtney Anderson, on Adoniram Judson. I identify with him in a number of ways. The call to pioneer. Depression. Fruit and very painful circumstances almost constantly mixed. Bible translation.

It was this last that struck me today. This was the passage, presumably from one of his letters:

I sometimes feel alarmed [he reported] like a person who sees a mighty engine beginning to move, over which he knows he has no control. Our house is frequently crowded with company; but I am obliged to leave them to Moung En, one of the best of assistants, in order to get time for the translation. Is this right? Happy is the missionary who goes to a country where the Bible is translated to his hand. (pp398-9)

Perhaps the most important sentence in this section is “Is this right?” How can a missionary set aside talking to potential converts, to work on a book maybe no one will ever read? This must strike the conscience, and it must be dealt with.

The correct answer, I think, has to do with the relationships between longer term and shorter term strategic priorities. What can I do today that will make tomorrow better in some way? To just push off people is unconscionable, but so is continuing to labor day to day with no effort to get the scriptures to those who are (or even may be) converted.  So Adoniram made the tough (and I think open to criticism) choice of delegating daily evangelism for the sake of the future growth and health of the church.

For me, there are two problems with this. First of all, I’m working another step removed. I’m not working so that a single people group will have the scriptures some day. I’m working on systems, and training and raising up workers, so that all of central Africa will have scriptures that speak with power. So it’s an even longer term investment than daily translation for a single people group.

But the other problem is the message of the vehicular graveyards. Who ever built (or bought, shipped, maintained, etc) a car so it would decorate some corner of the forest as it decomposed? I even saw a rusting carcass of a printing press once. Certainly that was bought and shipped there with the idea that it would help the missionary enterprise, not that it would just take oxygen out of the air.

So what will become of my work? I know nothing lasts in this world, but as I consider longer term strategic priorities, I must consider the possibility that I shoot so far out, that nothing comes of it before it starts decomposing. My time in DRCongo felt a bit like this; I planned for ten years, and prepared and built tools with that horizon in mind, but they weren’t used very much when we left only four years later.

So I try to constantly mix planning horizons. I feel the pull Adoniram described, to work for future missionaries, so I must set aside time for that. Added to this is the repeated realization that I know no one with the vision or capability to do what I’m doing now (not bragging, just reality; this is a niche work).

But Kim and I also sing in the church choir most weeks, and I lead several of the men of the church in Bible study most Saturdays. These are each a different horizon (making worship happen this week and growing up future leaders), but they both address the question of the people right here in front of me.

Then there’s the team that’s actively translating the scriptures, without understanding the tone writing system developed for them some fifty years ago. Has the language’s tone system changed? Probably. Has tone and writing system theory changed in that time? Definitely. Can I help them get back on track? I hope so.

Then there are A→Z+T users, present and future. I’ve been doing a lot of prep work for a tone workshop in the spring, which involves getting people up to speed with A→Z+T and evaluating their trained for the workshop. During this time, I’ve gotten to interact (face to face, by email, and through zoom) with people at different levels of competence and preparation, so I’ve gotten a broader vision for what A→Z+T’s user base will most likely look like.

Sometimes the user question is addressing specific issues, other times it’s fixing things in a more principled way, to avoid future issues. But I’m also working on a workshop presentation and book chapter to help potential users get a vision for what is now possible.

So it feels like running a sprint, a 5k, and a marathon, all at the same time (not that I’ve ever run a marathon, but I imagine…)

But it gives me courage that I’m not the first one to confront these questions, even if some of the details are new. Adoniram didn’t have Python, Autosegmental theory, or object oriented programming (though he did have snakes, elephants and tigers), but he did know the difficult task of prioritizing the needs in front of him today, and what most be done (today) to prepare for tomorrow.

And when I think of Adoniram’s first ten years of missionary service, including a death prison, the loss of his first wife and several children, along with any hope that his translation work would be preserved through the Anglo-Burman war, I’m encouraged to know that God did preserve that translation work, though a series of improbable coincidences. And he ultimately built his church in Myanmar on it, with generations of Christians using that translation to great effect.

So apparently (he comes to realize, again) God does know what he’s doing, even if His planning horizons are even longer and more complex than we can imagine. So please join me in prayer, that the One worshipped by the magi would lend me some of His wisdom in these days, as I sort through what to do when, and prioritize appropriately long term strategies that will produce fruit that will last.

Merry Christmas!

Family,

Our choir, Sunday morning after Christmas. This group has been a blessing to us in the ups and downs of the last couple years.

Totally coincidence that our robes match the children’s Christmas program poster (which Kim made…😅) Smiles are courtesy of Anna, whose drama made us laugh. 🙃

Merry Christmas everyone!

Work in Progress

Anthropology, Missiology, Personal, , ,

I saw this building this evening, and we commented on the logic of putting walls on the top storey of a building before the lower ones were done. Then as I thought about it, that’s a bit like what I’m doing with A→Z+T.

The work on tone on words in isolation is basically done, but I’m still getting started on the work for consonants and vowels, which a linguist would normally do first. One reason I did it this way was because tone is much harder for people to get on their own, as compared to consonants and vowels.

But another reason has been creeping around the back of my mind for some time, and I’ve just come to understand it more fully. That is, one can look at the tone of full word forms and ignore (to an extent) how words are composed of meaningful word parts. This can’t really be done with consonants and vowels, as the place in the root is often much more important than the place in the word.

So now in order to implement consonant and vowel analysis, I need to implement root parsing, and account for multiple forms per word (e.g., singular and plural for nouns, imperative and infinitive for verbs).

I’m order to do this, I’ve been digging into the foundation, to make the ~9k lines of code (in the main file) more manageable, so that the building process will be more manageable. Practically, this means converting ad hoc functions I’ve built over time into sensible classes, so things will be more terse, flexible, and easier to fix each problem in just one place, and to build (just once each) functions and objects that can be reused in multiple contexts. So a deep dive into object oriented programming, of that means anything to you. Things have come a long way since BASIC…

So, having the fourth storey more or less livable (people plan to use it in a workshop next March/April), I’m now shoring up the foundation (OOP) so I can build the first storey (root analysis), so I can then build the second and third storeys (consonants and vowels).

Just so you know what my work is like these days, when I’m not actively addressing user issues (as come to me most days), or consulting in linguistics issues. Not exactly building an airplane while flying it, but definitely trying to manage short, mid, and long terms goals all at once.

Perfectionism and the Strife to Enter Rest

Anthropology, Bible, Missiology, , ,

for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
Hebrews 4:10‭-‬11 (ESV)

This passage I have long found difficult to understand, and even moreso to apply. But today I heard a sermon addressing rest, and a couple things fell in place.

The preacher said that God didn’t rest because he was tired, but because he was satisfied. I think this is not the only motive here (the example for our good also being there), but I think it is an important point.

For us, then, if we desire to follow His example, then rest should also include satisfaction. But for some of us perfectionists, satisfaction is hard to achieve.

My doctoral coursework beat some of that out of me. I was constantly faced with the choice of trying to work longer on something, in hopes of being satisfied with it later, while acknowledging the cost that work would have, on my family, sleep, and ability to do other things which I also found important. Ultimately I came to say that I simply needed to be satisfied with what I considered B level work. The irony is that I never actually got a B, however much I felt that was the most that my work deserved. So the standards of those judging my work were not the same as the standards I held for myself. In this case, logic dictates that meeting higher standards is in excess, and a bad use of my time and energy.

But I still want things to be without flaw, even on points which are clearly unimportant to everyone around me. So there remains a discipline to be satisfied, to “strive to enter that rest“.

Which brings us to the irony of the passage: “strive to enter that rest” is not something that easily fits into the head. How does one strive to rest? One answer suggests itself by the reason for doing this: “so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience”. That is, not striving to enter rest is disobedience? That doesn’t necessarily help things make sense, except to make clear that the striving and resting is a question of obedience, rather than just putting our work towards our pleasure or ease.

The word obedience leads us to another. While verses 6 and 11 use the word disobedience, chapter 3, verses 18-19 equate disobedience with unbelief:

And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
Hebrews 3:18‭-‬19 (ESV)

Thus not striving to enter rest is not just disobedience, but unbelief. This reminds one of this principle:

For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. (Romans 14:23b ESV)

Biblical though it be, it would be nice if the above also made sense. I think the connection is that when I insist on using my perfectionist judgement, I’m actually trying to protect myself from failure, and I’m trusting in my own work to do so. Rather, the satisfaction that comes from faith (and thus a right relationship with God) acknowledges that I have already failed so seriously that my works are (and will always be) far insufficient to make up for my failure.

So God’s command to me in these moments is to trust Him and His work in the cross, rather than my standards and my work to meet them. It is an act of faith to set aside my vain attempts at perfection, and to trust rather that I am already OK.

But the act of faith is at the same time an act of striving, because of my need to be freed from slavery to my current set of oppressive expectations, a slavery that I work hard to maintain:

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?… I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
Romans 6:16,19 (ESV)

When we present ourselves to a master other than God, this is sin by definition: idolatry and a lack of faith (however you want to look at it). I think the trick is to understand that we present ourselves to our perfectionist expectations just as much as we present ourselves to drunkenness, adultery, or pornography. We think that adding another law, or higher expectations, must be something else. But when God talks about lawlessness above, he’s not only talking about no law, but about living outside His law.

So, to wrap this all up together, the command is that we say yes to God as an act of faith and no to our inclinations, as an act of striving, without these being two different acts. And this command is sweet, because the act of faith/striving it requires gives me both a right relationship with God and liberation from slavery to my own oppressive expectations.

A→Z+T

Family

I’ve talked through with many of you the project that is framing almost all of my work now, but the other day we realized I hadn’t fully introduced it here. It is a public and openly licensed project, at github.com/kent-rasmussen/azt, where there is a ton of documentation, and all you need to install and run it —in case you’re interested. 😉

In case it isn’t clear, this is a new methodology to accomplish a lot of the same work we’ve been doing for decades, bringing together methods and philosophy that I’ve long been told are incompatible. Anyway, well see about that…

#FluentReadingMakesPowerfulBibles

My June 6 Ebenezer

Family, , ,

I will always remember where I was that warm Wednesday afternoon, standing in our tiny second-floor apartment in the living room of the married student housing for the University of Oregon. I had just walked in from teaching my sweet Grade 3 & 4 class at Lifegate Christian School. I was rocking the baggy denim teacher dress of the 90’s. Kent told me right away to check the answering machine (remember those?)

Returning from Kenya in 2000. We were babies!

See, we had been applying for membership in Wycliffe Bible Translators. We had met in Wycliffe training school, served overseas together for a year teaching Wycliffe kids/doing linguistics and felt very clearly called to pursue work somewhere in the world getting Bibles in the hands of those without. Kent had applied years before on his own in the middle of a dark season and been rejected. We were told we should finish his MA in Linguistics and reapply. He was entering his final year, so in January we had a friend ask a friend at Wycliffe Headquarters if we should reapply now. The news we received was crushing. They did not want us to reapply at all.

We got that call one dark, cold January night and immediately got on our faces. How had we followed Jesus down this path for so many years and now it was blocked? All doors closed. Not just closed, but bolted shut. Had we heard wrong? Did He really want us to do something different? We surrendered it to his hands, fell asleep and waited. A few days later, a call was scheduled with the Director of Recruitment. He had some questions. Because of my work schedule and the time difference, we were meeting over the phone at 6:00am. I am not sure exactly what happened in that 45-minute phone call, but it began with a list of all the reasons they never wanted to hear from us again, and ended with him begging us to reapply and that he would like to handle our application personally! (He even drove several hours out of his way the next month to meet with us personally on a business trip – and bought us fried chicken! Grad students cannot be picky.)

We were elated to see God miraculously open this door that seemed firmly closed. We began all the paperwork. There were forms to fill out, essays to write, Bible knowledge tests, interviews and finally medical exams. We were working around our full-time student and teacher roles, so it took a few months to get it all done. The Director had told us that they met to review applications once per month and the last meeting before summer holiday would be June 6. All of our papers were in except for my medical form from my doctor, which had been mailed from Oregon to Florida several weeks earlier.

We began to wonder if it were lost in the mail, or lost in their office, or just where it went! This too, felt like another obstacle that we did not understand, and that we were powerless to move. The Director was praying that it would arrive. We were praying that it would arrive. And day after day it was not there. The Director called us the day before the vote to let us know that it had not arrived, so our application was incomplete and we would need to wait another several weeks for the next meeting to vote. It was such a disappointment after we can come so far in so many months. We tried to trust in God’s timing.

As I hit “Play” on the message machine that June afternoon, the Director had called again. He described how he took the elevator down to the mail room on his way to the 9:00am meeting just in case my medical form had arrived extra early – and there it was! Who gets mail before 9:00am on a Wednesday morning? Right on the top of all the mail for the day was the very missing letter we had been praying for for weeks! And it arrived the hour before the meeting to vote. He was able to add it to our application, deemed it complete and present it to the board. They all unanimously voted us in as members of Wycliffe Bible Translators! What a message!

Revelation 3:7-8 say, “What he opens, no one can close; and what he closes, no one can open. I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close.”

We had seen God open doors that were firmly bolted and locked, and these closed doors had taught us to keep our eyes on Him, not on our circumstances. There would be several times over the next few years that I looked back on this process in 2001, and because of how it all happened, I KNEW without a shadow of a doubt that we were on the path that Jesus chose for us to walk. It was a confirmation that kept us going through 9/11 (and flying to Wycliffe’s Training Camp right afterward), assignment to Eastern Congo when their president had just been assassinated, raising support, and so much more that followed that year.

June 6 is more to me than an ‘Ebenezer’ (rock of remembrance) about membership in Wycliffe Bible Translators – 20 years, it is an Ebenezer to God’s ways being higher than mine.