But How Will They Hear?

00:00
Rich Rudowske
The word of God and the Holy Spirit working through that is powerful. And where that’s absent, how can that church be effective and really take root? 

00:20
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the eEssentially Translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. My name is Rich Rudowske. I’m the Chief Operating Officer here at LBT. 

00:28
Rich Rudowske
Today’s episode is a crossover episode with a program called For You Radio. It’s a program and podcast hosted by Craig Donofrio and Troy Neujahr. I got the chance to be on the program and be on the other side of the microphone as they interviewed me about missions, Bible translation, and the work of Lutheran Bible Translators. For You Radio airs weekly in the Cleveland market on several stations and is part of the 1517 network. You can find their podcast and many other resources at 1517.org. We hope you enjoy this little change of pace on the Essentially Translatable podcast as we cross over with For You Radio. 

01:14
Craig Donofrio
You’re listening to For You Radio, where the Gospel is for the unbeliever and the believer alike. I’m Craig Donofrio, pastor of St. James Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio. 

01:25
Troy Neujahr
Dang it. I was trying not to look at you. I’m Pastor Troy Neujahr, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, Shaker Heights, Ohio, and I can at least say that without sounding really odd and trying to throw me off. 

01:37
Craig Donofrio
Oh, that’s good. 

01:39
Troy Neujahr
I hope anyone else that listens ever finds this amusing. 

01:43
Craig Donofrio
I know you do. Okay, Rich, why don’t you introduce yourself? 

01:47
Rich Rudowske
Hi, I’m Rich Rudowski. Am I supposed to tell all about who I am? 

01:51
Craig Donofrio
Yes, you’re our third microphone guest today. 

01:54
Troy Neujahr
Yes, indeed. You could have said that. 

01:56
Rich Rudowske
All right. I am Richard Oscar. I’m the Chief Operating Officer at Lutheran Bible Translators. 

02:00
Craig Donofrio
LBT. 

02:01
Rich Rudowske
LBT. 

02:02
Troy Neujahr
LBT. He’s the COO of LBT. Right. 

02:07
Craig Donofrio
It gets confusing, really. 

02:11
Troy Neujahr
Yeah. He didn’t say much here, but he’s not only the CEO, but he’s got six years on the ground field experience translating the scriptures into a language that had not yet been written. 

02:22
Craig Donofrio
Now, that’s impressive. 

02:23
Troy Neujahr
That is impressive. And I think showbiz rules also mandates that I say, and he’s been one of my closest friends for over 20 years now. 

02:30
Craig Donofrio
You’ve just alienated all the listeners and me because you two obviously are very close. 

02:36
Troy Neujahr
Oh, I apologize. 

02:37
Craig Donofrio
Yeah. Troy, if people wanted to find For You Radio on the internet or send us an email or any of that good stuff, what would they do? Where would they go? 

02:46
Troy Neujahr
Well, all the normal places. You got foryouradio.org. You can email us at foryouradio at 1517.org. The Twitter machine. Right. That’s still up and running? Yes. That’s still a thing with the kids. They tweet? 

03:01
Craig Donofrio
I believe so. 

03:02
Troy Neujahr
Okay, so you can find us at For You Radio, followed by the number one and Facebook. I think you just search for For You Radio. I don’t know. 

03:09
Craig Donofrio
Do we have an Instagram? We need an Instagram. 

03:11
Troy Neujahr
Yeah, you know what? I was thinking about that. So find us on Instagram and tell us where that is. 

03:16
Craig Donofrio
Tell us if we have one. All right, well, let’s jump right into it, shall we? 

03:24
Troy Neujahr
Yeah, let’s do that. 

03:25
Craig Donofrio
Rich, tell us a little bit about LBT, what it is that you guys do and how long you’ve been doing it for. Not you necessarily, but LBT in general and all that information, where to find them on the Internet and everything else. 

03:39
Rich Rudowske
Sounds good. Lutheran Bible Translators started back in 1964. There was a missionary who had been working in Nigeria, member of his family, his youngest daughter, got sick and died, so he came back to the U.S., was recalled by…it was Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and just kind of dedicated to his youngest daughter, Mary Jane was her name, to her memory. Wanted to be sure that folks could engage in mission and the kind of mission that he was doing, this linguistic Bible translation work. So he and some pastors out in California got together, and long story short, they formed Lutheran Bible Translators back in 1964 and for the first 50 years or so, the organization’s main purpose was to recruit, train, and send western missionaries to work in Bible translation. 

04:28
Rich Rudowske
There are thousands of languages around the world with no access to Scripture in a language they understand. And a lot of those places were in really remote areas and without a lot of development and so forth. And so missionaries were sent, and over the years, over that time, the church has grown in many of those places, and like a second generation of that leadership has really recognized that there’s a need for Bible translation further for their own evangelism and outreach goals. And so we’re sort of shifting, still working with missionaries, but also working directly with church partners in Bible translation work. And so that’s a little bit about who we are on the internet. We’re at www.lbt.org, and you can find out more about us there. 

05:13
Craig Donofrio
What languages are you working on currently in the way of translation? 

05:17
Rich Rudowske
We work in 92 different languages. 

05:19
Craig Donofrio
Wow. 

05:20
Rich Rudowske
Right now? Yeah. So there’s over 7000 languages in the world. And I bet if I read through even some of the 92 languages, there would not be any that you’d recognize. I mean, these are really small. Well, they’re small, comparatively. So I worked in a language called Shikalahari, and there’s 250,000 people who speak that language. So in the scope of world languages, that’s not a lot of people. But if you say, hey, we have the opportunity to spread the gospel to 250,000 people, I think if I offered that to any one of you’d jump all over that. 

05:50
Craig Donofrio
Yes, we have at least twelve listeners to this program, right. 

05:55
Troy Neujahr
And counting. 

05:58
Craig Donofrio
So how does someone get involved with LBT, and what’s the process? A, where do you find the new languages that need the Bible translated into that language, and how does someone begin translating that, and how do you get them plugged in and how does all that work? 

06:15
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, the world kind of community of Bible translation organizations. Right now, there’s several organizations around the world that work in Bible translation. And in the past five years particularly, we’ve really worked hard to coordinate and systematize. What do we know about language situations in the world and these 7000 languages, who’s working in them? What’s been done, what needs to be done? And for us in LBT, our niche in that is to discover where Lutheran churches particularly are growing stronger and have a vision for mission and outreach. And we’re connecting with them then to determine where are the folks that you want to reach out to? And then we come alongside and give some technical advice and expertise. 

06:58
Rich Rudowske
So once a language community has been developed or been identified, I mean, we’ll work with them to determine the state of is the language written or not written? That will determine how things go in terms of production, developing a writing system, or whether there’s not going to be a writing system and there’s just going to be a lot of oral recording work and so forth done. And there’s as many answers as there is to the question. I mean, the people who get involved in the translation will likely come from the community. It could be that the church and the local community will have the expertise to provide a lot of the workers, too, and they have the right education level for that to work. Well, in other cases, we will provide training or even one of our missionaries go. 

07:40
Rich Rudowske
And we have 55 people right now, 55 American and Canadian missionaries around the world working in places like this. 

07:48
Troy Neujahr
Now, I know that when we’ve talked before that a lot of the people you’re working with are multilingual, right? I mean, they speak in different languages, and so very often there is some form of Bible translation available to them. Right. It might be. I don’t know what the equivalent in English would be. 

08:08
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So folks will generally have to know a larger language of wider communication or a national language. So, like in where we worked, there’s a language called Setswana that most people in Botswana knew that had a Bible translation. And then folks that were really working at a higher level will also know English. And those are where some of the connection points happen at those levels. 

08:35
Troy Neujahr
But the distinction being is that you’re working to bring these scriptures into the language of their homes, into their heart language, right? 

08:46
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. This is kind of a difficult concept, I guess, for us, who are really monolingual, because for us, that language is the same everywhere. The same thing I’m talking at home to my kids, except for maybe a lack of formality or something like that, is the same thing I go out and speak when I go to the shops. It’s the same thing I speak when I’m in church or that I hear when I’m in church. But for a lot of folks around the world, that’s not the case. Where you’re talking at home, the easiest and most comfortable way that you know to speak is one thing, and when you step out the door of your house, that’s something else, and it’s a level removed from how comfortable you are and how deeply you understand. 

09:21
Rich Rudowske
And then certainly when you get to those trade languages, it’s pretty distant. 

09:24
Craig Donofrio
I have a good friend who’s in South Africa. He’s South African, and he said that there’s. I can’t remember how many official languages in South Africa, but six or more I can’t even remember. And it’s interesting that even though there are common languages, English being one of them, I get the impression that people aren’t necessarily fluent in all the languages. So if you handed someone an English Bible or an Afrikaans Bible, and their native tongue is Swahili, they might be hard-pressed to actually be able to understand it fully. 

10:00
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I think that gets to the purpose of what is it that the Scripture and the written Scripture particularly is for in the life of the believer and in the church? And so you can get to somebody who has a fairly basic comprehension and not even fairly basic. I’m sure they’re quite fluent and able to speak this second or third language. The Bible goes into deep things, and it has a lot of complicated ways of talking about things for many reasons, and to really drive down to the heart of what that is. The scripture is designed to go to the heart, to remove as many barriers as possible, I guess, is what we see our mission in Lutheran Bible Translators to do to remove barriers to the Gospel, particularly where those barriers are, the lack of ability to understand what’s in the Scripture. 

10:47
Rich Rudowske
There’s a college professor in the language I work in who teaches in English, teaches in Swana, and he knows the Bible. Very active believer. But he was reviewing some of the book of Revelation in the Shekgalagari language I was working in, and he was just floored by how vivid the picture became to him of the glory of God in some of those scenes in Revelation that he’d heard before, he’d read before, but it just didn’t connect the same way. 

11:11
Craig Donofrio
That’s amazing. So how do you go about identifying a language that needs the Bible translator, or how do you go about making the decision, hey, here’s a group of people, they don’t have the Word in their language and we’re going to give it to them. What’s the process like on that, and how does someone get sent to do the work? 

11:31
Rich Rudowske
So we place a lot of value in what our church partners are telling us. We have attempted to work in these areas and there is a language barrier here. So we hear that information. We do look and see. What do we know from other sources, from the Bible agency world? What can we see that’s been on file that people have done? We have. What would be really boring for your listeners, but these metrics and this whole checklist of things that we look at to determine, is this a good fit for us to get to work in? What are some of the values are the importance to the Lutheran church presence, our ability to deploy people there? 

12:08
Rich Rudowske
All those things are looked at and in generally a process that can take two or three years at best to determine, yeah, this looks like a place, then, if it’s going to require a missionary to be sent, we’re waiting for those recruits to come. And that can still be a couple of years yet for that recruitment process, that onboarding process. And I don’t know how deep you want me to go on this, but, I mean, if it is a missionary, then we train. And Mike, our Executive Director, will always say, no matter what your level of education is, we’re kind of like Navy SEALs for missionaries, so it’s not enough, and we need to train you more in linguistics, and we’re going to send you to the kind of the ends of the earth to do this kind of work. 

12:47
Troy Neujahr
But really two or three years just to decide if that is going to be a viable mission opportunity for you. 

12:53
Rich Rudowske
Often when we’re first hearing about it, yes. And I think I would love for that to be faster, but it’s just the ongoing conversation back and forth and identifying. Yeah, does this look like a good fit? Are the resources available? So I think we could decide pretty quickly. I’ve often heard something and said, yeah, like the first time I hear about it, this looks like something we want to do. But the runway for that can be a good two or three years before we say yes. This fits into our project inventory. 

13:20
Craig Donofrio
One of the things that I appreciate about the way that we’re doing missions now is not like the way that we did it a hundred years ago, where you send a white man to Africa or South America or somewhere like that, and then he’s there and then he dies and the mission kind of dries up. But now we’ve actually used our brains a little bit and we’ve decided, hey, you know what? If we raise up pastors from the indigenous people, there comes a time where we can take our hands off and walk away, and they’re running the church in Bible translating. It seems like this is kind of one of those frontline situations, though, that you need the Word of God in the language to raise people up to take over. 

14:03
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I think it can be recursive. So in some places, the church is already there, but know just something is missing or we’re not connecting with folks, and it’s not very deep. And we say, well, let’s talk about Scripture. Now, in Ethiopia, for example, on the other hand, the church there is saying we need Bible translations in all of these outlying languages because that’s proven for them over the course of several decades to be key in their expansion. And so we’ve worked with them to start in their seminary, a training program that leads to ordination for these candidates who also are trained in Bible translation, so they can be sent to work in Bible translation as coordinators, like what we used to send missionaries to do. They can be pastors. They’ll probably be both. 

14:49
Rich Rudowske
And even the church there has a mission sending arm, and they might get sent to another country from Ethiopia in mission work. So just even taking another step back and saying, how do you empower where the Lord is at work? How do you get behind that and align with that to keep engaging in mission more effectively? 

15:07
Craig Donofrio
Yeah. 

15:07
Troy Neujahr
So you are really, in your career, you’ve straddled like two separate missionary worlds. I mean, you’ve done the traditional way out deep in the bush, as it were, sort of missionary work, but you’re also doing this very modern sort of missionary work where you’re working with partner churches around the world. That’s just got to be really neat to see that transition happen, isn’t it? 

15:30
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, in many ways it was happening as I arrived there. So it’s been the life I’ve lived and then, you know, sort of got promoted to have to do it for everybody. But, I mean, it was the way we worked from the beginning where I was at that the Lutheran church there in Botswana provided one of their deaconesses to work in the translation project, and we worked through the Bible Society to hire somebody else. So from the beginning, it was very locally led. Local committee made all the decisions about who would get hired, and what to translate first, and what the products would look like and all that stuff. I was very advisory from the beginning, which I think is where Western missionaries are still involved. And what I ask for our missionaries to do is to really work at that sort of level. 

16:13
Rich Rudowske
If we’ve been invited to be there, we’re advisory and we’re really wanting the local decision-making to happen and for us to give that time to develop and to foster that. 

16:24
Craig Donofrio
What are some of the stories from the mission field that you’re hearing about right now, or some of your own also that have been really amazing to you? I mean, I know that there has to be, with your time in the field, some really amazing things that have happened. 

16:39
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. Bible translation has a really long…if the runway to get it started is long, then the process itself is also long. So we lived there for close to six years. And the product that resulted, if you look at it from that perspective, was the Gospel of Luke being translated, the 24 chapters of the Gospel of Luke. That was what we accomplished in six years. But of course, the foundation building and things ahead of that were important. And so for me, the best memories and the fruits of missionary service really had a lot to do with being present with folks. And that was how they would talk about it, too, that we lived among them, worked among them, and when the village was out of water, we were out of water, or we shared our water with them. We ate the same food as them. 

17:25
Rich Rudowske
But we have some really great stories, too, of just folks that were Christian, and by and large, Botswana identifies people from Botswana, identified themselves as Christian, but lots of stories about folks that really came to grasp what it means to put all your eggs in that basket and to count on Christ being supreme. The one deaconess that was part of the project, she for quite a while had been pressured by her family where she didn’t have a placement when she graduated from seminary, she’d been pressured by her family to go to the traditional doctors and have them do their thing to try to make something happen for that was just what you do. Because when they sent her away that was a sacrifice on the part of the family and she’s not. Anyway, she waited and she ended up working for us. 

18:12
Rich Rudowske
And that turned out to be income-wise better than anything she could have been doing. It was her testimony to her family that when we wait for the Lord, this is what I’ve learned in seminary. If we wait for the Lord he’ll give us more than we can imagine. 

18:24
Craig Donofrio
So she was local? She was, she wasn’t from the States, correct? 

18:27
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. 

18:28
Craig Donofrio
See, once again raising people up amongst the indigenous people. But you worked, it sounds like you worked with a church that was already established there. 

18:39
Rich Rudowske
Well the Lutheran church is established in Botswana and out in the village were at, it was there. And again the folks really identify as Christian. In this little village of 5000 people there were 42 different Christian churches registered. So all the denominations had their church and then anybody that got mad at their cousin also had their church. And what was missing, and the chief of the village were in was really, he was on the committee for the translation and he said his reason for being involved was our people are so fractured and divided for lots of reasons, but one of them is also the Christianity, the way it’s been brought to us and we need to know the truth of the word of God so we can unite around that. And that’s something that always resonated with me in missiological reading. 

19:24
Rich Rudowske
There’s a guy named Kwame Betiaco is a missiologist in Ghana and he would say no people group should be considered reached until they have the Scriptures available in their mother tongue as the foundation for building sustainable Christian thought life and community. So it really spoke to me about what are we trying to do in what we call mission service or evangelism. What is it we’re actually trying to accomplish? Just a one-time thing as, “Hey, I told you about Jesus and you said yeah, I believe that and I baptized you.” And then what? I mean the building of the church is the point of mission. And how can the church really be built on solid ground and grow and perpetuate itself without the Scripture available for people as the foundation for building? The thought that you really touched on. 

20:08
Troy Neujahr
Something that’s really close to my heart on this too. Just that all the different things that we do and act out on the world stage that we name as being mission. And yet there’s this one overarching need, and that’s the scriptures. So can we maybe talk for just a few minutes about why the scriptures are so important? Why is the word of God such a foundational thing to all mission? 

20:34
Rich Rudowske
Well, it’s the means by which God is promised he will act. And the Word of God is living and powerful and active. And I think that where the Word of God is not present and people are working from a second or third language or from whatever they have sort of decided to be the authority, there’s nothing that binds that church together, just even from a practical perspective of where people can be united around a goal. I mean, you could think of that secularly, but then if you think of that spiritually, the Word of God and the Holy Spirit working through that is powerful, and where that’s known, how can that church be effective and really take root? I guess with God, all things are possible, but he’s told us that the Word of God is the way that’s going to happen. 

21:24
Rich Rudowske
And you can see when Paul’s talking about what he’s going to do in the term he uses is evangelism in the Greek. It has to do with proclaiming the gospel, but it also has to do with leaving people behind. And those people build up the church. They have the public reading of Scripture. Like he says to Timothy, all of those things, the Scripture, there is a powerful tool that’s to be used. 

21:49
Craig Donofrio
It seems like if you have all these churches, but you don’t have the Bible in the language of the people, that it’s just ripe for corruption and abuse and all sorts of things. I think about, of course, Thomas Aquinas putting the Bible in the vernacular, the Latin back then, the Vulgate, the Vulgar language, right? The common language. 

22:12
Troy Neujahr
Aquinas did then, as Jerome. 

22:15
Craig Donofrio
Jerome. 

22:15
Rich Rudowske
Sorry. 

22:16
Craig Donofrio
I said Aquinas. I’m sorry. I’m on 4 hours of sleep. 

22:20
Rich Rudowske
I’m just sitting here like, yeah, and. 

22:22
Craig Donofrio
Then when Martin Luther put it in English and Wycliffe put it in German, Luther did that. 

22:28
Rich Rudowske
Luther did everything. 

22:30
Craig Donofrio
But, yeah, we’ll move forward. Thank you. Now I’m a complete idiot, but Wycliffe, sometime later, puts it in English, Luther does it in German, and of course, it sets the church on fire because people didn’t know Latin like they used to back in the day. And of course, the church was full of abuse because no one could hold up the Bible and say, but, pastor, this says here. So when you run into a situation like where you were, did you see a lot of this kind of abuse or not even intentional, but just misunderstanding? 

23:05
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, misunderstanding, for sure. And taking some of whatever I think a text says and applying it here. I mean, the first engagement we had with the community, in conjunction with the committee, was to notice at funerals, people gather together publicly all the time, and somebody or anybody can pick up a Bible and say whatever they want and read whatever they want and say whatever they want. So the first thing our project did was to produce a book of texts appropriate to be read at scriptures with some basic commentary on why. And that was our first real widespread foray into the community was for that reason, let’s think about what’s appropriate to read at this time instead of just pulling something out of thin air. 

23:54
Troy Neujahr
Well, it really strikes me as being the way that Christ comes to us. I mean, in his incarnation, he enters into our lives. He becomes one of us. And the work you’re doing with Bible translation has that same sort of flavor to it, that it’s the word coming into the lives, the homes, the hearth of the people. 

24:16
Rich Rudowske
That’s right. And a lot of folks, we marked 1517, or 2017, as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. But the Reformation wouldn’t stick if it hadn’t been for 1521, when Luther releases that New Testament in the common language of the people. So at LBT, we’re getting ready to celebrate 2021, the 500th anniversary of the Scriptures. And that’s what makes it stick. If it’s not for that, it never would have taken hold. 

24:44
Craig Donofrio
Isn’t that amazing how God works? Luther is running for his life. He’s abducted by his friends and held captive in a castle against his will. And he’s bored. I think I’ll translate the Bible right. I’m bored. 

24:57
Rich Rudowske
I’ve been meaning to do this. That was his own Covid-19 project. 

25:00
Craig Donofrio
I turn on the tv when I’m bored. Luther translates the Bible. We’ve got just a minute left. Once again, tell people about your website, how they can donate, how they can find out more about the work that you do and how they can be involved with what it is that you do. 

25:15
Rich Rudowske
Sure. The website is www.lbt (for Lutheran Bible Translators) lbt.org. A great way for congregations to get involved is to talk to your pastor and church leadership about Bible Translation Sunday, which is the last Sunday of September. And we’ve got a lot of great resources on our website for that lbt.org/bts for Bible Translation Sunday. 

25:38
Craig Donofrio
BTS. 

25:39
Troy Neujahr
BTS. We’re going to have to do that. You could. If you act fast, maybe you can book Rich or something. 

25:45
Craig Donofrio
You’ll be snatched up real quick. Well, we’re pretty much out of time. Thanks so much for being with us, Rich. It’s been great. 

25:52
Rich Rudowske
Thank you. Great to be with you. 

25:57
Rich Rudowske
Thank you to Craig Donofrio and Troy Neujahr and the crew at 1517.org for having me on the For You Radio program to dig a little deeper on the purpose and sustainability of mission, the growth of the church, and the role of Bible translation. As I mentioned in the program, if you’d like to access materials for your congregation or small group to participate in Bible Translation Sunday, the last Sunday of September, or whenever works for your congregation, please visit lbt.org and click on the Bible Translation Sunday link. Thank you for listening to the Essentially Translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. Look for past episodes of the podcast and leave feedback lbt.org/podcast or subscribe on Apple, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

26:42
Rich Rudowske
If you go to those other platforms to subscribe, please leave us a good rating so that others can also find the podcast. Follow Lutheran Bible Translators’ social media channels on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s Word in their hands. The Essentially Translatable podcast is edited and produced by Andrew Olson and distributed by Sarah Lyons. Executive Producer is Amy Gertz. Podcast artwork designed by Caleb Rodewald. Music written and performed by Rob Veith. I’m Rich Rudowske. So long for now.