Planning Bible lessons

With our return to Kovol being delayed a month or so while Oscar’s wrist heals, I’ve been keeping myself busy in the office.
Our team has 3 tasks immediately in front of us.

• Literacy
  Finish final checks on the program, build a classroom, pick students and start the first literacy class
• Bible translation
  Translate the verses we’ll need for our evangelistic Bible teaching.
• Lesson development
  Prepare the evangelistic Bible teaching lessons which go from Genesis to Revelation with the aim of laying a firm foundation for faith. We call this phase 1 and phases 2 to 4 follow it. (A review of phase 1, Acts and then Epistles make up phases 2-4).

Final checks on the literacy program require that I sit with Kovol speakers and check that everything communicates as intended. Getting the literacy program going is our highest priority right now, but I can’t make any more progress until returning to Kovol.

The office time this week then has been in Bible translation. The start of the process is an exegetical draft where I study the paragraph to be translated and do my best to translate all the meaning there into the Kovol language. That is something I can work on alone while we are here in Goroka, and so it was to that I turned. It’s a huge task. My attitude has been one of just making sure I put the hours in as that is the only way to keep chipping away and making progress.
I’m building up a stack of drafts. I’ve done Genesis chapters 1-9 so far and  these are all waiting for me to sit with Kovol language speakers to start the transfer process.

My exegetical drafts are very rough around the edges. They are sure to be unnaturally structured and with weird or mistaken vocabulary. The next part of the process requires that I get an audio recording of each paragraph from the mouth of a Kovol speaker so I can adopt some of the naturalness of how they speak the paragraph. From there I will move on to comprehension checking with further Kovol speakers.

So, while I can’t complete the process I can at least start it.

It has been a satisfying week of taking my laptop to the office and drafting a new chapter of Genesis each day. I’ve been making careful notes of vocabulary I’m short on and phrasing I don’t think is correct. At some point in the future I need to return to these chapters for the next steps, so I’m making copious notes.

What to translate next?

Our Genesis to Revelation teaching program very obviously called for the early chapters of Genesis to be translated and used in the lessons. As I progressed though the question was “what next?” I’ve hit the stage where I’m moving out of whole chapters and into portions, and the obvious question is which portions?

Translating an entire Old and New testament is the work of decades. We don’t want to be waiting that long before presenting the Gospel to the Kovol people, so we’ll be picking the portions we need to trace the main story and themes of the Bible. To help me pick the portions I have:

• The original “Building on Firm Foundations” lessons (70 lessons in English for tribal peoples).
• The “Firm Foundations” lessons (50 lessons in English for use with English speakers).
• The E2E “Eternity to Eternity” lessons (58 lessons in English, an update to Firm Foundations that goes to Revelation).
• A plan for the Kovol lessons that lays out which Kovol cultural themes will be addressed by which lessons and that blends the 3 lesson sources above, adding in some unique Kovol lessons.
• A “Coordination of Chronological Teaching and Translation” that gives a list of verses to be translated from “Building on Firm Foundations”. It suggests which verses need the full translation procedure and which can use a “provisional draft” procedure.
• A “Coordination of Chronological Teaching and Translation” for the E2E program

With that to guide me I took to Excel and created a list of verses to translate for phase 1. Each step of the procedure for each verse has a cell for writing in the date as each step is completed. Easy peasy, just go down the list, right?

I went into the week excited to get into translation drafting. It seemed a simple case of working through the list and ticking the boxes as I went. I’ve come to realize that I need to think much more strategically and that now is the time to dive headlong into lesson preparation. We’ve got to start preparing lessons so we can see exactly which verses need to be translated, and which can be summarized in the lesson itself. Lesson writing seemed to me to be just beyond the horizon. It’s quite a shock to run into it so forcefully already!

Ideal vs. Real

The spreadsheet gave me a total number of 1,906 verses to translate for phase 1! Using the full translation procedure to translate the Joseph story took about 45 minutes per verse in total. About 1/3 of the new verses to be translated are marked as needing a full translation procedure. 2/3 of the new verses are marked for a “provisional draft”. This means one less comprehension check and a consultant check isn’t required.

If we say that this means on average 30 minutes per verse then we’re looking at about 950 hours of work time to translate all those portions, roughly 6 months of full-time work for a translator. Bush life, with all its distractions and interruptions means longer than 6 months will be needed, and the lesson writing and literacy work will be running concurrently.

A great advantage of being out in Goroka is access to experienced missionaries to pick their brains. I took my thoughts to Ralph from the Dinangat team and BJ from the Wantakia team. Both teams have taught through phases 1-4 and are continuing with translation. Dinangat had 1,100 verses for their phase 1, and Ralph said it was a lot. It makes me think that 1,900 is too high a goal.

Ideally we’ll have all those verses translated and ready to be read in and alongside the lessons. The reality of being a 2-family team with other tasks on our plate makes me think we need to cut down the number of verses we translate to support the phase 1 teaching.

Keeping those advantages in mind it still looks like we need to have a careful think about what verses we will translate to use in the lessons, and where it makes sense to “tell the story” without necessarily translating big chunks of scripture.
The Hansen family will be due a home assignment in 2 or slightly more years. We’ll need both families in Kovol to teach phase 1 as it would be too much for a single family to shoulder the teaching responsibility. Not to mention that the Kovol people have been waiting to hear God’s word for the last 15 years! They asked for missionaries for 10 years and then waited 5 years for us to learn to speak their language. We feel an urgency to teach the phase 1 course as soon as possible.

Asking those further ahead

This raises the question: why even translate? “Because that is what New Tribes Mission does” isn’t a good enough answer as I wrestle with figuring out what phase 1 will look like for Kovol. Two advantages of having translated scripture came out of my discussions.
The first and most important is that we want to model to the Kovol people going to God’s word to get the truth. During the lessons we will teach something and we’ll then turn to a separate book containing the scripture portions and we’ll read it. Hopefully some of our literacy graduates will read the verses. We’ll demonstrate to them that the things we’re teaching can be found directly in the Bible. We won’t teach something and say “trust me, I’m a teacher”; we’ll point them to God’s word. What teachers say always needs to be measured against what God’s word says.

The next benefit is in the creation of reading material for readers to practise reading. Readers need material to read to strengthen their reading skills and what better than God’s word?

What corners do we need to cut to be ready to teach in a year, or a year and a half? Is it really cutting corners, or is it better thought of as focusing our attention? What scripture is absolutely essential to have, and how much beyond the essential should we try  to translate for phase 1?