Bible Poverty

So, if I asked you the question: What is the one thing (or a few things) that Christians in “struggling” areas of the world need? You might say “stronger pastors or leaders,” or “better theology,” or even “more churches.” All of these are true, but something I personally overlooked is the simple need for Bibles. Bible poverty is a real thing in our world. To help walk us through Bible poverty is Danny Foster, president of The Canada Institute of Linguistics and member of the Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Episode Links

Danny is president of The Canada Institute of Linguistics.

 

Also, you can find all the stats and the full report of the Canadian Bible Engagement study here.

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*Below is an edited transcription of the audio.

Well it’s great to be talking with Danny Foster today. Danny is the president of The Canada Institute of Linguistics, and he’s also a member of the Wycliffe Bible Translators in Canada. Thanks for taking some time out of your day to come to our offices and have a conversation with us about the Bible and about linguistics.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah for sure! As we do with everyone we talk to, we love to hear a little bit of the humanity and the person behind the voice. So I guess the easiest question is: who are you? Family, different things like that – hobbies maybe? And a little bit more in detail of what you do as the president of CanIL and what that’s all about.

I’m a husband and a father of two young boys – Josiah is eleven and Isaac is nine. They were born on the mission field while serving in Tanzania. I grew up in Scarborough, Ontario to Jamaican immigrants – my mom’s from Kingston, my dad’s from Montego Bay. I have 6 older brothers – so I’m the youngest of seven boys. It was awesome growing up in that kind of environment.

I absolutely love cooking, that’s my release at the end of the day. I go home and I just dive into the kitchen and go nuts.

What makes me tick? I’ve always wanted to be in ministry since I first sensed there was a calling on my life back when I was a teenager. Took me a while to figure out what that was going to look like. That eventually morphed into missions. But it all clicked for me one day back in 1989. I was sitting in a chapel where I was studying at a Bible College in Peterborough, Ontario. A guy from Wycliffe came and did a presentation. He basically threw some numbers out there that shocked me because I was learning about missions from the perspective of “theology is really poor in parts of the world and we need to train pastors better and improve leadership and plant more churches and have more quality pastors,” and so that’s what I was perceiving as the problem: bad theology where the church was developing.

And so when I heard that there were 7,097 languages in the world and at that time (it was 1989), over half of them were identified as needing a Bible translation project, around 3,500. At 19 years old I had this vision that if I live my whole life on this earth and when it’s all said and done a language community that never had an alphabet before has one, that never had some stories before has them, basic literacy, but most importantly a translation of the Bible or at least the New Testament, then man, my whole life was worth living. And I still look back at that as a 19 year old and I think, “Man, that’s a pretty lofty goal.”

In some ways, that testimony is something I hope happens in our conversation today,