wels Archives - Page 6 of 8 - WELS Friends of Africa

November 17, 2021November 18, 2021

Translation Foundation

screenshot from online translation workshop

Half a lifetime ago I locked myself into a room with a Bulgarian pastor. We were reviewing translations of Bible commentaries and the Lutheran Confessions. We used to argue for hours over how to best convey complicated theological concepts and terms in the Slavic tongue. I learned the hard way that translation work takes great skill, patience, and flexibility. The Star Trek universal translator machine is ridiculous fiction. Google algorithms can translate individual words and phrases, but it always fails to see the forest for the trees. Computers lack the ability to analyze, decode and transmit human speech from one language to another. There is no substitute for the human mind.

November 3, 2021November 1, 2021

Hills to Conquer

LCCA Malawi Pastors enrolled in BDiv course

Oh, the hills. How striking they were as Howie Mohlke, his wife Leslie, and I drove east from Lilongwe, Malawi down toward Lake Malawi.

So were the sloping tea fields and the hills and valleys in the Sondu area of western Kenya when I saw them a few weeks later with Anariko Onunda: stunning.

*Tea field*s span the slopes in Western Kenya for miles

Why tell you about hills?

October 21, 2020October 14, 2020

Two Witnesses

And I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days (Rev. 11:3)

Rev. Patrick Magombo is the author of “Chilangizo”

When you hear a foreign language that you don’t speak, you hear sounds that don’t mean anything to you. But what is meaningless noise to you conveys a concrete, intelligent message to a someone who understands that language.

The Gospel message of salvation by grace alone has the power to free enslaved hearts. The Gospel transforms irascible scoundrels into servants of God. And yet to a skeptic, this message of free forgiveness is utter foolishness. Only God’s Spirit can raise the spiritually dead to belief through the “foolishness of what is preached” (1 Cor 1:21).