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After the gospel came to a small community in northeast Nigeria, two men on two different continents spent five decades translating Scripture into the Kamwe language.
About 70 years ago, a handful of people with leprosy and a blind man shared the gospel with the Kamwe people in northeastern Nigeria, and many in the community accepted Jesus. Today, up to 95 percent of the Kamwe profess to be Christians. This year, 30,000 copies of the entire Bible are being printed for the first time in their native language.
Christianity Today interviewed Bible translators Roger Mohrlang, an American who spent 38 years as a theology professor at Whitworth University and oversaw the translation work, and Mark Zira Dlyavaghi, a Nigerian who was the primary translator and team coordinator for the project. They shared why they got involved, how they persevered, and how their translation efforts might shape the rest of Nigeria.
Why and how did you decide to get into this work originally?
Roger: It all began with my conversion to Christ during my college years. I was a physics student at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. I had an engineering professor who asked me one day, “Are you a Christian?” He was the one who encouraged me to use my college years to get into Scripture. I spent endless hours reading, studying, memorizing Scripture, and that, more than anything else, changed my whole life.
I realized my life was not going to be centered on physics. What can I do that would be significant in the work of Christ? I didn’t see myself as a pastor or an evangelist, but I was drawn to Bible translation, in large part because of the effect that reading Scripture had had on my own life.
Mark Zira: I went to a missionary school that was close to my village. One of the lepers was in my village, teaching God’s Word. He opened the primary school there. He started it as a ‘Christian Religious ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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