Co-Creative Processes

00:01
Rich Rudowske
God’s hand is always at work. God is always at work, whether we do something that looks like success or not. Welcome to the centrally translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. I’m Richardowski. 

00:23
Emily Wilson
And I’m Emily Wilson. And today is a different kind of episode where I get to interview Reverend Dr. Richard Rudowski. 

00:32
Rich Rudowske
All right, Jr. Oh wow. 

00:37
Emily Wilson
So you just completed your doctoral studies at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne. Congratulations. 

00:45
Rich Rudowske
Thank you. 

00:45
Emily Wilson
Big accomplishment. So can you tell us a little bit about why you chose the program there, what was all involved in it? 

00:53
Rich Rudowske
Sure. I’d been encouraged for a long time to consider doing doctoral work, and the thing that I really wrestled with is once you make a commitment to doctoral work, you really want to do it about something that you actually love. And I didn’t think I loved anything enough in the world to do that. So it was quite a while and I was interested in studying missiology, the study of mission, and I looked in several different programs. The Fort Wayne program had a very nicely structured missiology program with a lot of various course content that explored various facets of mission and then exposed you to different resources and areas of thought. 

01:34
Rich Rudowske
And I felt like for being in a full time ministry role, if I was going to doctoral work, I was going to need that kind of structure to get me started because there are other types of programs that are completely based on whatever your interests are, and you just get the time and space to explore and research and go where it all takes you. But that just didn’t fit with me personally, no matter what I’m doing. But certainly in a full time ministry role. I needed some structure to get me launched out. So that was the main reason for that and the networking possible with other church leaders. 

02:06
Rich Rudowske
And I’ve had the privilege to work with different church leaders in this role, but to get to know them on a different level and to study with them and be colleagues in a doctoral program has been very rewarding as well. 

02:17
Emily Wilson
So what was your dissertation focus on? Before I reveal the actual title, what was your process in deciding what it was that you were going to actually research and write upon? 

02:30
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I wanted to think about how to effectively engage communities in Bible translation work. We talk a lot in mission world about partnership, and I just wanted to explore what the difference between saying that you’re partnering with somebody but actually giving the tools and categories and space for authentic partnership and realizing that’s not something that automatically happens was something I really wanted to look at and I wanted to evaluate if the experience that I had working as a missionary in Botswana, where we tried to really value that idea. If were effective in creating a context for authentic partnership with the language community, we worked. 

03:09
Emily Wilson
Right. Because it varies on what you’re actually saying is authentic versus in practicality. 

03:18
Rich Rudowske
Sure. Yeah. And I wouldn’t want anybody to think that I’m saying, I don’t think anybody ever intends to be in partnership and be inauthentic. It’s just that there are blinders or barriers that prevent you from realizing, because I come from a position where I have the resources or I have the power or I’m used to calling the shots, that it’s not an even playing field. And when I get out there, I may be blind to those things and think I’m being in authentic partnership, but I’m not really creating the space for others to join me in that. 

03:48
Emily Wilson
Right. So the process of exploring partnership, and what does that look like? You landed on this fabulous title, evaluating co creative processes in planning the Shikalahari Bible translation project. All right, break that down. Sure. What was it that like? How did you land on co creative processes? 

04:11
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. Well, just to take one step back from that, in the PhD program, every time we would start an intensive class, the professor would ask us to introduce ourselves and then to talk about what it is that were thinking of doing research on, which usually stumped a lot of my classmates. And I just actually blurted out that title just because it was something that co creative. I can explain in a second where I came from. But that was, like I just said, evaluating co creative processes and planning the Shikalahari Bible translation project, which for everybody was like, wow. And also, what does that even mean? But co creative, it actually took me a little while in the research. That was a word I had heard, or a term I had heard. 

04:54
Rich Rudowske
I remember discussing it with Rob and Ishni Vayetu work with us here at LBT and whom I worked with in Botswana. And I didn’t remember the context, but I remember the know. And I thought co creative was a term that we used or that they used to talk about how you would partner with someone and start as much as possible from an even playing field. Now, when I was in Botswana to do my field research, Kelsey Rolke actually reminded me, hey, that term comes from this book. And I was like, yes, that is it. That’s what I’ve been looking for. So I checked that out. But co creative, the original context for the word is from a book called Creating Local Arts together. 

05:32
Rich Rudowske
And the author there is talking about like, you’re working with a community and you might create music or art or some other thing, and what process would you go about so that you would investigate collaboratively what your values were and make something new together? He called that co creative. And I just thought when we think about Bible translation, that’s creating a work of art as well, in a sense that it’s a literary work of art, and so that it had a lot of potential to be used as a thought process for how you would do that, too. Much more complex and detailed and in sort of a different space. But that’s where I kind of co opted the term from. So that’s from Brian Schrog, by the way, in case he ever listens. We’ll give him credit. 

06:18
Rich Rudowske
But, yeah, so co creative, as opposed to collaborative or coordinating. I wanted a word that would make you stop and have to think collaboratively. If you take it apart means to work together. And there’s a lot of collaborative work that happens, but it can still happen with those same blinders I talked about a minute ago of like, okay, you just sort of approach it like, we already know the common task, so let’s just figure out how we’re going to do it. Co creatives takes a step back and says, what is the task? What is the common goal here? And gives the space to evaluate that. 

06:49
Emily Wilson
Right. You give some background on just bible translation principles, the history. And I like how you were just actually hinting at it of that it is an art. And you mentioned in the dissertation how translation kind of moved from being an art into a science. And can you walk us through a little bit? I know that there’s a lot of detail within Bible translation history, but in the more broader sense, what has that looked like through the generations? And where are you leaning towards in this co creative processes? 

07:25
Rich Rudowske
Sure. Yeah. Translation, when you go back into the roman era, I guess, and see some of the writings in Latin that talk about translation, one of the values they talk about is the creativity that can come with translation. And that in general, it’s really to be valued, that you take the language from what’s being expressed in one language and find a way to express it very naturally and clearly. And so you end up with a lot of freedom on how you move between what something might look like structure wise, from one language to another. And in fact, in that era, if somebody called somebody a faithful interpreter, that was not a positive thing. Faithful interpreter was sort of like a backhanded, derogatory thing. Like, you’re just kind of slavishly following. You’re not very nuanced. You don’t really know what you’re doing. 

08:12
Rich Rudowske
And that type of interpretation was really only for, like, if I’ve got a legal document and I’m going to translate it between one or the other, I’m going to do that, but it’s not really artistic. So that’s kind of how a Translation was approached in the 20th century. If you think about, like, almost every aspect of life became affected by the scientific method and the idea that you can create a method and create a reproducible track of how you do things step by step, and you’ll get the same result, and you can make conclusions based on that method. So linguistics and translation were not really exempt from that. And Eugene Nida is an author, particularly, that talked about the principles of translation. 

08:56
Rich Rudowske
And in a sense, how if you do translation a certain way, if you do certain things, you’re going to get a good translation. So you had to try to keep it simple here. One could conclude, although I don’t think Nida himself intended this to be the conclusion, but one could conclude, if I just do step ABCD and E, then I’m going to get a good translation. And then reality has borne itself out that you can do step ABCD and E and have a translation and find that people still don’t use it. And so over and over again, people wrestle with the idea of, like, well, what’s missing in the steps here? What’s the one step we might be able to find if we just added step g or f? I don’t know where I was. But anyways, then we would fix it. 

09:36
Rich Rudowske
And so that does kind of stem from an idea. Like, there could be answer. It’s still based in the scientific method, if you will, that if we just had answer here, maybe we need to work on a certain oral method, or maybe we need to do a certain thing. And if we did that here and it worked, then it probably works everywhere else, too. That’s all based kind of in the scientific method. And in a sense, the Bible translation movement and Bible translation ministries have maybe not on purpose. I don’t think if I said to somebody, is this how you think about it, that they would agree? That they do? But I think, again, it’s sort of just a blinders thing that we approach it in a sense as a sort of scientific thing. 

10:15
Emily Wilson
So backing up a little bit into, I mean, we’re celebrating the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s New Testament and his translation. What kind of method would you have classified for him as he approached translation into the german vernacular? 

10:33
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, he definitely approached it as sort of an art and what we might today call dynamic equivalence, in a sense, in that he really felt like it was important to make it sound as natural and german as possible. In his writings about translation, he says that we don’t ask questions of the Latin as other people when they’re translating, do we go to the market and we listen to how the mother in the market speaks to her kids and how people speak in natural German. That’s how this text is supposed to speak. So he was free, then, from trying to recreate the same sort of grammatical features and to say things like, one of his controversial ones is we are saved by grace through faith alone. That text does not have alone in the original greek language. 

11:23
Rich Rudowske
But he said, well, I’m adding it because a German would need to hear it. 

11:29
Emily Wilson
Right? 

11:30
Rich Rudowske
Would need to hear it for emphasis. And so that’s controversial. I’m not sure we might feel differently about that. But the point is, he really looked at the receptor’s experience, the hearer’s experience, as critically important as much as what the text said in the source language as well. 

11:48
Emily Wilson
And then as it comes forward into this almost scientific method, which is to be lauded, that they’re trying to find what is formulaic about Bible translation. How can we get God’s word into people’s language in an efficient, expedited way. Right. However, culture is not always scientific. We have this idea of alone. Right. Like, to be able to get that point across. Luther knew in his language this was an art, and that’s just one little detail. And scripture is full of detail. And I think that as we’re processing, okay, translation method and culture and expectations of the community, that it is very artful. And that’s where you landed with this co creative process. So can you break it down a little bit? You share in your dissertation, I think it’s pronounced scopus theory. 

12:51
Emily Wilson
And where that falls within going from art to then scientific method and into this kind of new kind of thing. So can you share a little bit about what does that look like? 

13:03
Rich Rudowske
Sure. Yeah. Some of the scientific pieces, as you’ve mentioned, and some of theory, there are good things that can be drawn from that. And it’s not like it’s just a wide open, blank slate across any culture or language. In looking at the research in the long section of the dissertation that goes over different areas of research, I felt like the method piece of translation has been covered quite a bit in terms of different methods and different approaches. But what hasn’t been covered enough is just what are ways to approach the relational aspect? That’s just kind of always assumed in the literature somehow that will happen in one way or another. But it’s not really a lot of guidance given there for how you might approach something as you think about working interculturally. And that’s what’s really important. 

13:53
Rich Rudowske
So the scopus theory is a tool that’s designed to ask of whomever a translated product, this could be secular translation as well. But to ask of the intended audience of a translated product, what are you expecting from this translation? How will it be used? And so forth. And so the clients of the translation have their opportunity to give their feedback to it. And so applied to Bible translation, then it’s the same kind of thing to ask people like, how do you intend to use this? What are values that you have? Translation theory, as proposed by Naida for Bible translation really kind of defaulted to a simplified, very well explained text. But if you take the cultural aspect that you mentioned into account, that’s a very western, especially United States value, that clarity in communication is seen as paramount. 

14:48
Rich Rudowske
Well, if you start to look in other cultures, you’ll see, for example, that clarity and just simple communication can be seen as rudimentary or unsophisticated. 

14:57
Emily Wilson
Right. 

14:58
Rich Rudowske
And so then one might ask the question, is this how the scripture should be communicated, or what are other values that come into play there? So scopus theory, to put it more simply than I am, is a way to stop and say, let’s ask those questions of the text. And there’s a certain order that it asks questions in, and the last one is the source text and what it demands. It’s not that is still accounted for, but there are other questions also of audience expectation and desire for the text that are to be understood and accounted for as you go about translation. 

15:31
Emily Wilson
So one of the aspects that I’ve heard as your position of director for program ministries and chief operating officer is this vision casting of. We, to this point, have only really studied the lag measures. What happens after the Bible translation program has been completed? What are the effects that there’s not necessarily this determining factor of success. Like, this is a Bible translation that is going to be utilized by the community to be engaged with beforehand before the program is completed. And so you share in your dissertation that you have sought to develop an instrument. So I’m just going to read it. What you have had in this dissertation, I have sought to develop an instrument that can measure these and other factors as predictive lead measures of scripture usage by local language communities. 

16:27
Emily Wilson
The twelve factors measured are one, community ownership two, translation process and progress three, interim publication and use four, local language literacy program five, capacity building six, local organization active involvement in decision making activities about project resources seven, local church and community group engagement in translation processes eight, design marketing acceptance of translation materials nine, translation brief content ten, translation brief function eleven, consultancy clarity of role twelve, consultancy method. That’s a lot. So can you break that down? Exactly. So there’s a lot of factors that are involved in scripture usage. So this is part of the co creative processes. How did you land on those and how did you actually dive into the research as you were measuring these? 

17:32
Rich Rudowske
Okay, yeah, I think a common factor for all of those twelve things are that there is the attempt to evaluate a relational component. What’s happening relationally as work is being done in the project with the various stakeholders. And that was a piece that we felt was missing from the methodology that just says, well, if you technically do translation a certain way and follow certain principles, you’re going to get a good translation. We were trying to predict, based on research that was done after the fact that lag measure you talked about where somebody says, well, this translation appears to have been well used because these things happened while translation was going on. We’re trying to take that information and say, okay, if that’s true, then how do we observe whether that’s happening during the translation process and sort of assign value to that? 

18:22
Rich Rudowske
And so the various twelve, which, I mean, I don’t even remember without having them in front of me, we have an instrument that helps us do that. But the various twelve, basically the common denominator again, would be something is going to score higher if the aspect that’s being looked at is being done better relationally than not. So one of them is a project brief. The project brief is a document that comes out of scopus theory, which says we’ve, as the community and other stakeholders have agreed, this is what we’re looking for a translation and this is some guidance for the translators and things like that. Well, that’s in our instrument to evaluate. Do we think that’s having a positive impact on future usage? 

19:05
Rich Rudowske
We would say if the community was substantially involved in the formation of what’s in that document, that’s going to score higher than if just the translation team and a few outsiders kind of worked through that process and put it down, and that’s going to be higher than if just a couple ex patriots at a desk, put it all down and brought it to. That would actually short circuit the co creative process if you do it that way. 

19:28
Emily Wilson
I think that’s a huge distinction. It’s not grading the project brief itself. It is grading. Like, okay, what is the community involvement? And how is this, like you said, relationally affected? And I think that can be easily glossed over. It’s like, oh yeah, this is great. All of the goals are listed or something, but if it doesn’t have the buy in from the community, is it truly a co creative process? So you focused in on a few centrally in your dissertation. You didn’t tackle all twelve, thankfully, because otherwise I would still be reading it today. 

20:13
Rich Rudowske
Yes, I’d still be writing it. 

20:16
Emily Wilson
So when you went in to do your research, can you kind of break it down a little bit? Before we go into the co creative processes and what you landed on, how did you set up your research and the survey work that you did? 

20:31
Rich Rudowske
All right, yeah. With any dissertation, the thing you’re always going to get guidance on is you have to limit, like, you can’t fully study any issue. Right? So we chose a specific project, language project, Shakalahari Bible translation project in Botswana, which I helped to start. So if anybody would ever read the dissertation, you see that I have to have a whole section of explaining how I’ve tried to limit my own knowledge, insider knowledge of the project and bias and stuff like that. But we chose that project and wanted to look at what kind of records did the project have about how it was started and the ways things were done and to evaluate whether those things had been effective. And in looking at the project’s history, we landed on. I don’t know. I keep saying we because it’s me. 

21:17
Rich Rudowske
But anyways, I landed on three things to look at. There were plenty of other things we could look at, but three things, one of which was that there was a local advisory committee that was responsible for guiding the project and was empowered and believed they were empowered to do that. And those twelve items you read, I mean, you talk about community ownership as a few different things there. So that would be an expression of what that could look like. So we wanted to see how that came to be and how that functioned and whether that made a difference. The second was the selection of the translators, how that happened, and again, really looking at the community’s involvement in that process. 

22:00
Rich Rudowske
But in the dissertation, I still lay out what the process was, and one could read that and look at the appendices and see, there’s a framework here that you could use, but you would also say the more important part is how have I engaged the community? And what does it look like to do that? And the third one was a project brief, the formation of an agreement between the community and all their stakeholders in the translation of what they expected. And really unpacking that as what does it look like to do that? Because it’s not as simple as it sounds. You can look and sit there with a list of questions and somebody may know the answer. 

22:33
Rich Rudowske
But we found, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but we found that you got to create context for people to understand the questions you’re going to ask when you start asking them their expectations about the Bible before they can really effectively answer them. And that’s part of the creative process. Their co creative process is to slow down and recognize that and figure out a way to make space to do. 

22:58
Emily Wilson
Actually, when you were in Botswana, you were there for about two months. Can you walk us through what did the survey questions look like? How did you gather people together to ask the questions, and what did you find? Just generally, as you were researching, actually delving in co creative processes, how did you explain it? 

23:20
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, for those who know different research methods, I’ll try to keep it simple, but this is a case study, and so a case study has a lot of qualitative elements that you’re trying to assign value to and then make assertions based on the information you get there. And it has the opportunity then to have several narrative elements that sort of can richly describe what people are saying. And it also opens up the space to look at some, what would be considered objective things like, I had access to 13 years worth of project minutes and looking at how the project recorded its own formation and history and things like that. So I spent some of that time accessing that and sort of summarizing some of the flow of how the project formed and how that interacted with those three co creative ideas were talking about. 

24:09
Rich Rudowske
And then the process of gathering people. This is in the post Covid world, although it’s not exactly post Covid. In Botswana, at the time I was there, they had been under some lockdowns and those were just lifted as I was arriving. And so people were still in the space of figuring out how much they wanted to do public things or not do public things. Yeah, it was really interesting. The Republic of Botswana was very gracious in granting a research permit for the work. And, yeah, even in the midst of everything going on, they still gave a permit, which was a huge blessing. They required that for large group interviews that I would go to the chief of each village and get his or her permission to interview the people of the village. So that was a process in itself. 

24:57
Emily Wilson
Sure. 

24:57
Rich Rudowske
And then after having worked through that, we found that some villages. Well, okay, every village has a kotla, a central gathering space where people will come to talk about ideas and matters that are important to the community and share information. And so in some villages, when we made contact that we would like to come, people that were there made connections and had people come to the Kotla and could interview them. There are other places. We just walked around and found who was out there and interviewed them. So, in general, everybody was positive about the Bible translation project. There’s quite a bit of variance in terms of who had heard of or been exposed to the project and who had not. All of the respondents indicated that they were going to buy a Bible when it came out. 

25:44
Rich Rudowske
So those are kind of at high levels. It was a great reception that way. We had deeper and longer interviews with some of the pastors from the area, the people who formed the projects committee, quite a bit there. And then the two translators, Ponso and Hanang, had quite a bit of interaction with them and all of the expats that had ever worked on the project as well. 

26:07
Emily Wilson
So you mentioned about the kotla and that community coming together has actually played out in all of the Shikalahari Bible translation program and is part of what is the co creative process. Can you talk about the importance of the kotla to the program? 

26:26
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I have to say the kotla provides within the culture a ready made tool or place in which you can invite conversation. And that’s a huge blessing. And I would say that for folks working intercultural, if you can find that, what does that in the community you’re working in, that’s a huge win where you can get into that space. So the kotla was a fantastic mechanism to. Even in the early days of the program, once we had a core group of local leadership that really bought into the project and wanted to gain momentum in the area. Their solution was to go to every kotla. You go to every kotla they speak. And, yeah, then I knew enough Shakalahari that I could also speak some and impress all the people that this outsider could also speak. 

27:17
Rich Rudowske
And it really created the context where the community could be engaged, give their thoughts, hear what we in the group wanted to do, and to react to that. And to guide. So it just really created a space for that already to happen and to take that to a different level when we needed to go into some deeper things. 

27:38
Emily Wilson
So I have known you for almost eight years and it was really cool watching, almost like in my mind’s eye, this all unfolding of as you’re reflecting back on your experience, but also delivering this information without bias of what has worked well and what hasn’t worked well, and just ultimately how God is glorified throughout this process, even where one could look at it and say, hey, that didn’t work. And this is where we have corrected. Can you share a little bit about your journey as you were just reflecting on this? As someone who has been invested in this community, you’re still invested in this community and your desire for God’s word to be in their own language. 

28:31
Emily Wilson
What was it like reflecting on it from your own personal experience, but also then hearing from them about what looks like success in a Bible translation program? 

28:40
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, just really a great blessing. The whole process of working on the dissertation and being able to go back to Botswana and be with people there was such a gift and to reflect on the specifics of how things worked. It really just as you mentioned already, I can’t help but just say, definitely God’s hand is at play and God’s hand is always at work. God is always at work whether we do something that looks like success or not. Right? In this case, I just am very thankful for guidance I had before and my family ever went to live in Botswana. Folks that had recently completed their doctoral work saying, we really like you to understand some new ideas. 

29:24
Rich Rudowske
And just to plant the idea in my mind that it’d be interesting to see what it would be look like to try to work with these ideas from the beginning and then to just see how God had worked, to see where course had changed and to really land recognizing that you can always learn something. But the real short answer is that there’s no cookie cutter approach to anything. When you’re working interculturally, there are some values like how do I find the space to understand where people discuss important ideas and make decisions? How do I find the space to say, I’m going to ask you a question that is complicated. And so I’m going to do a lot of work to prepare things that help me ask that question in an effective way. Like the whole what translation style do you want to do? 

30:09
Rich Rudowske
Required multiple translations of Bible text. Required folks who spoke the language more fluently to really grasp the idea and to communicate to everybody else. Like, here’s why we’re asking the question. Usually folks, when they’re thinking translation, would think like, yes, it’s either a good translation or a bad translation. So to open the category like, all these are good translations, which one do you prefer? And to prefer a different translation in the Bible is not wrong. So all that stuff. So just really gratifying and all those pieces, every step along the way, there were lots of other people working really hard to pull that together, too. And yeah, their work was really great, and I appreciate them. And I guess in a way, wish they could have kind of walked the journey with me. 

30:53
Rich Rudowske
Maybe in a sense, looking at the dissertation, they can to a degree. But it was really gratifying to see how God worked through just sort of trying to find your way. And the end result really being that you have to try to understand and be willing to work with people, you’re not going to find a method that you can just say, I’m going to pick this up and do it over here, and it’s going to work. 

31:14
Emily Wilson
So as I was reading through the dissertation, I stumbled across this really beautiful quote from Ponceo Mo sue. And I’m just going to read it in its entirety and just want to hear your reflection on it because it was probably really gratifying to hear. At the end of the day, we know that we are part of this work for others. It has to benefit others. It’s not just my work. It is for the community. It’s for the people. It’s for everyone. Not just our people, but for all of Botswana, for all people around the world who may be interested in how we wrote our language and did this work. Any fights or disagreements should not break you as a person. We should stick together and work together because it is not for us. It’s for everyone. 

32:04
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, it’s a beautiful statement, and it’s a gift to have worked with the two translators on this project who are both this committed. And that’s not an automatic thing that happens in projects. So one hand, we don’t believe in luck as christians, but I’m pretty lucky that I got to work in this project that had so many things go well and the selection of translators and these two being the result of that process. Yeah, I certainly would recommend, like, it is the most important thing for folks who are going to work in translation to do the hard work and slow work of trying to assess how you’re going to find these folks. And this is because the community was involved and knew the candidates and could speak into their quality and veracity and be responsible for their personal lives and correcting things like that. 

32:55
Rich Rudowske
And so that’s the result of something like that. It’s this really committed, young, beautiful, christian woman who’s just expressing there’s something bigger that I’m involved in here. Anytime you work in mission, that’s what you want. You want that for yourself. You want that for anybody that’s working in mission is to realize, I’m at work for something bigger than myself. And because of that, I can go through a lot and recognize it’s not all roses and everything, but I can do it because it’s for something bigger. 

33:22
Emily Wilson
Right. I was just really struck by that she. And just as I’ve been part of Bible translation ministry in the office setting, but that there are all kinds of obstacles that can tear us apart, but ultimately that God is being glorified as we come together, as we work alongside our brothers and sisters in Christ, that this co creative process is glorifying to him that the Shakalahari language being translated, the words of scripture being translated into the Shikalahari language, that ultimately others are going to be turning to him and being encouraged by the program. And that idea of it almost reminded me of in know, in Jerusalem, in Judea, and, like, it keeps amplifying out know. This isn’t just for her. This isn’t just know her community or just for the Shikalahari language community. This is for Botswana. 

34:33
Emily Wilson
This is for the whole world to be encouraged in the church, that we all have something to learn from one another. I love this idea of the different facets that we see of scripture as different language. Communities have it translated into their own language. Anyway, I’m a little jealous that you had the opportunity to talk with her directly. I wasn’t part of that interview earlier this year when we released with Swara, Hanan and Ponso, two different episodes. But definitely I was blessed hearing them and their reflections. So if you were to hope for one thing, as people read your dissertation in the Bible translation world, our circuit, if you will, or just mythology in general, what would you hope for as people read through your research and apply? What would be your dream? 

35:33
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. That we’d come to recognize that any work done in mission is trying to remove a barrier to the gospel that we have inadvertently, or that just exists to people understanding the gospel so that people would slow down and say, how can we do this? What’s the relational thing that we need to do here and not abandon good method and tools and all these things like to use them all in service to God’s mission, but to recognize that I have some principles I can work from here, but ultimately it’s about working with people and it’s taking the tools and they’re always going to be in service to the people and just finding the space to remove the blinders to say, what’s it really look like to do that here? 

36:19
Rich Rudowske
What’s it look like to give the space and time to do that here and to really just do it? 

36:26
Emily Wilson
Well, thank you for breaking down the barriers for this dissertation. He pointed out which chapters to focus in on and how to make it easier and has been talking to me for, I don’t know, a year or something on what does this look like? So I already had that in my brain. But we wanted to share it all with you guys of just this exciting work of being able to see how God is working through co creative processes in the Bible translation movement. So thank you, Reverend Dr. Rich Rudowski, for being able to share your work. 

37:02
Rich Rudowske
Thank you very much. It was great to talk about it some and for the listeners. Now I’ll get back in host mode for a second here for the listeners. If you would like to see this dissertation, you can write an email to us at info@lbt.org we’d be glad to send it out to you. And yeah, for both of you who might want that. No, we’d love to share it with you. 

37:24
Speaker 3
Thank you for listening to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. Look for past episodes@lbt.org Slash podcast or on your favorite podcast platform. 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 was produced and edited by Andrew Olson. Our executive producer is Emily Wilson. Podcast artwork was created by Caleb Rotewald and Sarah Lyons. Music written and performed by Rob Weit. I’m Richardoski. So long for now.