Imagine if you tried to share the Gospel with someone, and they couldn’t understand any of the Bible.
This is a reality for more than a billion people who still don’t have a complete Bible in their language. And more than 165 million people don’t have even one Bible verse in their language.
Life.Church is working with an organization called illumiNations to translate the New Testament for 99.9 percent of the world’s population by the year 2033—and your church can help. Life.Church has pledged to help fund translation projects for four years, but your church can do anything ranging from a one-time gift to sponsoring the translation of a single language to a longer campaign.
You’ll find marketing graphics, videos, and social media assets on Open Network that you can use to let your church, and here are some ideas to get you started with including your church attenders in the calling to preach the Gospel to the ends of the Earth.
- Adopt a language. Whether your church sends a mission team to South America every year or you have a vibrant American Sign Language ministry in your church, your attenders will feel a passion for supporting the translation of the Bible into languages they feel closely connected. Visit the ‘Explore Languages’ page to find the translation project that’s perfectly suited to the calling and mission of your church.
- Go short or go long. Choose the length of time your campaign will last. At Life.Church, we’re committed to supporting translations for four years, but we’ll talk with attenders about it only a couple of times per year. Choose a time span—one weekend or one year—to pray about and lead your attenders toward solving Bible poverty.
- Give as a church. You can point your attenders to give directly to illumiNations, but we’ve found that there is more passion and buy-in when attenders give to your church first, and then you as a church give to illumiNations. There’s something so powerful in saying, “Church, we all worked together to do our part to eradicate Bible poverty and look what God did through it!”
- Set a goal. At Life.Church, we set goals for both time and dollar amount—at your church, choose goals that are stretching but achievable, and let attenders know as they’re reaching milestones in reaching your overall goal.
- Pray. It’s the most powerful thing we can do to help the Gospel of Christ reach the entire world. Pray for the people doing the translation work. Pray for how your church can get involved. Pray for every person around the world who reads the Bible for the very first time. Pray over your mission fund, over your attenders, over the “capital C” Church. You can find a ‘Pray’ button on the illumiNations site, too, to join with people around the world believing in the power of Bible translations.
Whatever you do, step up and do something. We have an unprecedented chance—like never before in all of history—to actually fulfill the Great Commission, and do it as Christ's unified Church.
