International (MNN) — At first glance, it might look like a colorful children’s Bible to you. But Open Bible Stories from unfoldingWord is much more.
This powerful, evangelistic tool is helping to raise up Bible translators around the world to bring Scripture into their own heart language.
“Open Bible Stories is 50 carefully chosen Bible stories from creation to Revelation, designed by a team of Bible translators, theologians and Bible teachers,” says Dane Skelton with unfoldingWord.
unfoldingWord® Open Bible Stories is developed by unfoldingWord® and the Door43 World Missions Community. The illustrations are © Sweet Publishing and the entire project—text and illustrations—is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
(Logo, caption courtesy of unfoldingWord)
“They’re theologically accurate, but they’re not Scripture, and that reduces the anxiety for many first-time translators, especially Muslims, about working directly with the Word of God.”
unfoldingWord uses Open Bible Stories as what they call “a translation primer.” The process of translating helps a group of believers learn the necessary tools, techniques, and concepts (such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, etc) that they will eventually use in creating a full Bible translation.
“Everything that our partners learned by translating Open Bible Stories into their heart language, equips them to move directly into Scripture translation,” Skelton says.
The Bible translators, sometimes new believers themselves, gain a basic survey of the Old and New Testaments through the Open Bible Stories. Skelton says two things start to happen:
“Number one, they are fascinated by the Old Testament history. They start to understand the whole scope of what God has done. Then they are deeply, deeply moved by the fact that, ‘God wants to speak my language?’”
Visit unfoldingWord.org to learn how you can invest your prayers and your resources into Bible translators around the globe.
“We are utterly convinced that God wants His church all over the world equipped to be able to translate the Bible for itself in every nation in every language. But we also know that the enemy doesn’t want us to do that. And so we really, really encourage people to join us in prayer, because that’s the key thing that keeps us going,” says Skelton.
Header photo courtesy of unfoldingWord.
