Africa Bible translators led to Jesus

Donna and Loren Entz have worked in Burkina Faso since 1978 with Mennonite Mission Network and via Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission. They collaborate with others, including Wycliffe Bible Translators and nationals of West Africa, in translating the Bible into the Samogho language. They have put many of the Bible’s stories onto audiocassettes.

“If you translate the Bible, it’s as if you are bringing to light what was hidden, what the devil has hidden. People are blind. If you translate, and they receive the good news, their eyes will open, and they will no longer be on the devil’s side,” said Bananzaro Calixte, an English teacher in Burkina Faso, training to be a Bible translator. Without God’s intervention, “the work you are doing, the devil will not let you do it. The best way is to come to the Lord.”

That’s what happened to Traoré Siaka, a former Muslim who said he’d found compelling questions in the Islamic texts he’d studied as a boy, but no answers he could use. It was the life of Jesus that gave him the answers he’d longed for and which transformed and inspired him.

A similar transformation happened for Ali Traoré, a former Muslim who began working as a Bible translator in 1993. “I’d had the Bible in my hand before, but I never realized how strong the words were. My conversion wasn’t the result of evangelism. It was the result of being in constant contact with the Word of God. That really changed my life.” Ali converted to Christianity in 1998 and was baptized in 2000.

Bible translator Traoré Fabé said he was similarly transformed. “The work that I did really made an impression on me. It wasn’t something I could escape. The words really weighed heavily. For four years, I worked on the translation. In 1997 I made my decision to follow Christ because I saw that I had to make an active decision to follow the path that God made for man to follow.”

In the group culture of rural Burkina Faso, becoming a Christian can cost a man his place in his family and his position in village society. In most villages, it means scorning the group’s daily reliance upon demigods, go-betweens and fetishes, and the goodwill of the dead. In this “traditional” world, people seek good weather and other favours by making blood sacrifices and doing what sorcerers tell them to do. Adversaries also wage unseen battle against each other by tapping into the powers that the sorcerers claim to possess. All this keeps the sorcerer class employed and often leaves combatants seeking out conjurers of ever greater power, for failure to throw up a proper defence would seem careless, said Byema Traoré, a Christian convert who lives in Samogohiri. “If you don’t do the things to protect your children, your parents are going to be upset with you, because you’re not doing what you should do – you’re not protecting them.” Breaking free of the fears of spirit war is one of the great comforts offered by Christ, Byema and other local Christians say.

Traoré Siaka, vice-president of the Mennonite Church of Burkina Faso and also head of Mennonite Central Committee’s peace ministry in Ouagadougou, said he recognized the Old Testament prophets from the Qur’an he’d read as a boy. The Qur’an gave him only questions, but the answers he found in the Bible came to him as logically as a mathematical equation. “When I got to the New Testament, I saw that Jesus came to save us from our sins. People are sinners, God is holy, and a sinner cannot come close to what is holy. Jesus came to save us; to help us get close to God. I thought: This must be the right way, because, if God is holy, and we who are sinners try to approach God, there’s no way. So the only way is to go through Jesus.

“I went to my father. I said, ‘Father, I need to be converted; I need to become Christian.’ My father told me, ‘Keep your heart the way it is. Don’t change.’ I asked him, ‘If I keep your religion and tomorrow we die, are we going to be with God?’ My father said, ‘No, we can’t know that.’ I said, ‘Father, I’ve found a Saviour whom the Muslims call the Messiah.’ My father didn’t say anything more. That’s when I became a Christian.”

Today, “the village people are looking at them and their families,” Calixte said of the translators. “If they have peace, then the others will come.”

—Charles T. Jones. A joint news release of Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission and Mennonite Mission Network