An Interview with Colleen
The Cross Cultural Missions Team (CCMT) will be featuring one of our mission partners each month on a rotating basis. We want to foster stronger relationships with our mission partners. We invite you to learn, pray and give to the important work they are doing to advance the Great Commission both locally and globally.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your organization and your role within it?
A: Technically I work for a Canadian company called Globalization Partners, but am seconded to an organization called Seed Company. Seed Company was founded by the (at the time) President of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Bernie May, in 1993. The goal was to see if he could find a way to accelerate Bible translation. The method that God used was raising funds and working with local, minority-language translators in the regions where the Bible has not yet been translated, training them up rather than having a Western expat spend years learning their language. This has now become common among other Bible translation organizations as well, although there are many models out there. Seed Company still focuses on those two areas: raising funds to support translators on the field, and working with partners on the field to start, maintain, and verify the quality of Bible translation projects.
My title is “Residency Consultant in Training.” A Consultant is the person who works with the local translation team as “quality control” and sometimes “trainer.” This mostly involves traveling to the region and checking that their translation is clear, faithful to the original languages (Greek and Hebrew), natural and acceptable (to the local church/community). My residency program lasts 3-4 years, during which I participate in these trips under a mentor, and in trainings and courses that will increase my competency until I am able to be certified as a Consultant myself.
Q: What is a recent project you've been involved in?
A: In March I travelled to India for about two weeks to participate in a translator training workshop. It was different from the usual trips where we are checking the translation of a book of the Bible with one team. This was a multi-team workshop organized by a local Bible translation organization (which cannot be named here due to security reasons). There is a consultant who lives there, who was willing to let me observe how they train translators and to lead some of the training as well. There was also an expert in archaeology, geography and history of Israel and the Middle East who came and led some really great sessions on those topics. There were eight translation teams who came to the workshop, and the main topic was the book of Isaiah – overview, Hebrew poetry, prophecy, how to translate some of the key terms, how to do exegesis in this genre, and a lot of background study so that the teams can understand what life was like in Israel at the time, in order to do the best translation possible. I learned a lot and enjoyed meeting with local translators and discussing some of the issues they face in translating into their languages. And I developed a new love for Indian food!
Q: What news from the mission field has been encouraging to you lately?
A: Every week, it seems, there is news of a completed Bible or portion of the Bible in a language that did not previously have it. And new projects are being started all the time. Often this means huge gains in evangelism, but also in discipleship: the language groups that do not have Scripture are usually able to understand Scripture in another language to some extent – a language of wider communication of their region, such as Swahili in East Africa, French in West Africa, or Hindi in parts of India. But that is not their first language, their “heart language,” the language that they speak at home and have their deepest conversations in. For those of you who learned some French in school, even if you learned it fairly well, imagine that the only Bible you had, and that your pastor could preach from, and that all your worship songs were in, was in French. And then one day you heard God speaking your language. Walls would come down, worship would flow from the heart, and you would be able to study the Bible more in depth and talk to your friends and family about it in deeper ways. Those are some of the gains that we see every time a portion of Scripture is published.
Q: What are some challenges you face in your work, and how can New City pray for and support you?
A: It is hard being a full-time working single mom. I work from home which is a huge benefit, but it is hard to get everything done and sometimes to be able to focus on my work. Please pray for wisdom in prioritizing and also for some periods of rest. Additionally, when I travel for these consulting trips, there is a need for some trusted person/people to stay with my children, and sometimes to pay for this care.
Thank you, Colleen for taking the time to share with us! We invite you all to you pray for Colleen regularly and to consider the ways you can walk alongside her in this important work.
