Dear Western Friends,
I wanted to share with you some jottings from this week; I have felt a burden to share with you what it’s really like to attempt expository preaching in an under-developed language.
In short: I fear that some Westerners misunderstand what is actually involved in introducing Bible teaching to nations where the language is still quite immature.
This week I got up to Matthew 7 in our studies in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. And as I prepared, I realised it was a very taxing task to try to explain what that famous little aphorism means.
I read Lloyd-Jones’ sermon on that verse and found it was full of very precise delineations of what ‘judging others’ means and does not mean.
And so I tried to find Kurdish words to say things like:
- we must make astute judgments, but not be judgmental
- We must be discriminating, but not discriminatory
- constructive criticism is right, but a critical spirit is corrosive to a church’s health (some of these thoughts remained in my study rather than making it into my talk, but were part of my mental preparation)
And so I probably spent an hour or two of my preparation time just working on vocabulary, and improving the entries in the Kurdish Wiktionary for ‘nit-picking’, ‘judgmental’, ‘discerning’ and the like.
It would be wrong to say that Kurdish does not have words for these concepts. Often there are words ‘out there’. But they are little-known and not in most people’s active vocabulary. Why? Because the Spirit of God has not breathed out his words into many people’s minds yet. And so people are not used to testing their lives by the bar of Scripture. That’s why they don’t have these words in their verbal armoury.
So, to put all this in perspective, my encouragement to many friends in Western churches is: yes, go on trying to promote expository preaching in the 6,000 language groups of the world. But wise up to the challenge that faces those you send out to do this task: you cannot simply translate Western Christian books into minority languages. The translator very likely will not have words at his finger-tips to explain Piper, Packer or Stott’s thoughts. And when you yourself prepare sermons in an underdeveloped language, you have to get inside the engine-room of language development. To switch metaphor slightly, you will have to chisel away at the coalface of the language, working with locals to find words that will explain and hammer home the message of the Bible.
As many of you know, my office work here has focussed for the last two years on developing the Kurdish wiki-dictionary. We have surveyed and documented all the vocabulary of the NT and about half of the OT. But my work on Matthew 7 this week showed me that although Bible translation leads to massive growth in any language, Bible exposition seems to stretch a language even further.
PS The title of this blog post is a slightly provocative reworking of Romans 10:14-15 (KJV):
"How shall they hear without a preacher?
15 And how shall they preach, except they be sent?"
Of course, at one level I am guilty of over-emphasising the task I'm involved in (and fundraising for!), and adding it to Paul's list of what is necessary for people to be saved. But I am trying to make the point that those in developed language groups tend to overlook the need for general language development in order that the richness and complexity of Scripture can be explained.
It might be objected that dictionaries are more essential for foreigners like me and that once educated local people are in pulpits, they will not find dictionaries as essential to the task of preaching. This is true to some extent, but I have observed that even those who are very agile in their mother tongue do regularly use the Wiktionary to help them write well. This is inevitably the case when people simply have not been exposed to a highly-refined and standardised language being used in school textbooks, newspapers and books, and in general conversation.
