Our OBT Students Learning About Producing Drafts This Week!
We are in week 6 of our 12 week lecture phase of the OBT school, so about half of the way through, and this week our students are learning about producing an oral draft with our guests over Zoom. It has been so fun these past several weeks as we have been going through the process of OBT with the students and seeing how they make new discoveries every day about doing Bible translation work in an orality-focused environment. What am I talking about?
Oral Bible translation is a mother-tongue, speaker-centered approach to Bible translation in which both the translation and quality assurance processes are carried out mostly orally, with the end result being an oral Scripture that is trustworthy, appropriate, intelligible, and appealing.
“OBT Handbook: Oral Bible Translation with Heart, Mind, and Body,” by Marcia Suzuki, YWAM’s University of the Nations
So this is definitition is helpful, but if you really want to know what we are doing to help serve oral mother-tongue language speakers to translate the Word of God into their language, please read more about it and learn how you can get involved via the link below, and come back!
… So now that you have a better idea of what it is that we are doing here in YWAM to help reach mother-tongue language speakers, you might be excited to know that we are currently training eight new students in the Fire&Fragrance South Africa OBT School right now! As I said before, this week we started learning about and practicing step three of the “Holistic OBT” process, and the students are doing an excellent job of leading internalization and exegesis of the Scriptures over Zoom with our guest speaker and guest “mother-tongue translator.” By the end of this week, we expect to have a final team draft of the Luke 19:1-10 passage about Jesus and Zaccaeus in the mother-tongue language, with the students facilitating the whole process. It has been such a BLAST!
In Other News…
I have been working hard to learn how is the best way to communicate with all of those who partner with me financially and in prayer, and I decided to start a new WhatsApp Group to bring you a little bit closer to the nations and so you can see a part of what is going on in my life. If you would like to be a part of this group, where you will get more regular updates (short ones), with some prayer points and fun moments, please open this link and join my WhatsApp Group, I think it will bring us closer together and encourage more of a dialogue between us… Welcome in!
Some prayer points for this coming month of November:
- Pray for the OBT school here in Potchefstroom, and for the other OBT schools around the world to have a lot of grace for communication and growing in love, wisdom, and understanding.. Lot’s of grace!! (James 1)
- Pray for me that I will have new revelations about the Gospel as I am preaching and stewarding the gifts that God has given to me to use for this season. I am also doing evangelism and doing a lot of pioneering work, so I just need lot’s of godly wisdom and revelation. (Ephesians 1)
- Pray for our future friends that we will make on our upcoming OBT outreach, that God will prepare our hearts for the translation work and for the deep relationships that will be forged through this wonderful experience together! (Ephesians 4)
- Thank you!!!
That’s all for now, friends. I will share more about how our OBT school is going again soon, and in the meantime, I would really encourage you to read more about OBT with that site I shared above! I will love to keep sharing more about OBT and the ministries and that I am part of, please stay tuned for more updates coming soon here and via the new WhatsApp Group. 🙂
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