Mustard Seed

Mary Steele at an event in her honor

When I first took an assignment in Ghana in 2011, Mary Steele had already been here for almost 50 years.

She came to Ghana from Ireland to do Bible translation way back in the 1960s. She went to live among the Konkomba people in northern Ghana. In a video made a few years ago, Mary said that her first years were very difficult because none of he Konkomba were interested in what she was doing. That was on top of the fact that the Konkomba lived in a semi-arid area known for high temperatures with bad roads, no electricity, and no running water. Mary lived simply among the Konkomba and she persevered.

Eventually, the Konkomba began to see the usefulness of literacy in their language. The trickle slowly became a torrent. It renewed their sense of identity and pride in being Konkomba. It helped their children succeed in school. Many thousands of Konkomba adults learned to read even though they had never been in school.

Then came the translation. At first, it too was not well received. But over time more and more read the translated Scriptures and found them compelling. It took decades, but eventually they were reading their Bible avidly. A religious renewal ensued. Whereas there were very few Christians and churches when Mary arrived in the Konkomba area, there are now hundreds of churches and hundreds of thousands of Christians. Today, a third of the more than 1,000,000 Konkomba profess Christianity. The Konkomba have moved from being a people untouched by the Gospel to one that embraces, or at least respects, Christianity. That has resulted in a reduction in drunkenness and other ills. People moved out of poverty. The status of women was raised. So, like literacy, Mary’s translation work was eventually widely and enthusiastically received. Even though that took many decades.

In fact, Mary became a Konkomba hero. Everyone knew her. Konkomba chiefs and politicians praised her and granted her favors. The president of Ghana conferred on her a national award as did the Queen of England.

When Mary died in 2017, the Konkomba held one of their largest funerals ever. It made the national news. Chiefs and politicians attended.

What started humbly with an unmarried Irish woman braving difficult conditions and profound indifference to study a language, do literacy and translate the Bible became a big deal. It took decades of small, imperceptible changes, none of them dramatic. But now the Bible, Jesus and the God of the Bible are a living part of Konkomba culture.

Here is another illustration Jesus used: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field.It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of garden plants; it grows into a tree, and birds come and make nests in its branches.” – Matthew 13:31-32

How prophets speak

I recently started watching The Dust Bowl, a PBS documentary about the drought and subsequent dust storms that drove farmers out of the midwest in the 1930s. The documentary starts with descriptions of the dustbowl by people who lived through it. Here are some things they said:

Let me tell you how it was. I don’t care who describes that to ya, nobody can tell it any worse than what it was. There ain’t no one exaggerates that. There ain’t no way for it to be exaggerated. It was that bad.

It was just unbelievable. It’d blister your face. It would put your eyes out. Well, I, I guess I can’t describe it. It was just, it was just constant, just that steady blow of dirt. 

You can try to get out of it, but it follows you, follows you, follows you. You can’t escape it. Looking back on it, it carried with it a feeling of, I don’t know the word exactly, of, of being unreal but almost being um … evil.

As these quotes show, when people see things beyond normal experience, they give up on straightforward description and resort to comparison, metaphor, figurative and even moral language. The dusty wind is given moral purpose by calling it evil. 

In the same way, when the Old Testament prophets were allowed to see real future events, they also found that normal descriptive language failed them; so they resorted to the kind of figurative language we call apocalyptic. Like this. 

As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. (Ezekiel 1:16-18 ESV)

Artist’s rendering of Ezekiel’s vision

The prophets are not being deliberately obscur. Nor were they engaged in wild fantasizing. They were just expressing as best they could events they saw in visions that were beyond their words. 

Sermon feedback

In many churches in Ghana, the congregation gives frequent feedback to the preacher during the sermon. People might say amen, or make another affirming comment, giggle in appreciation or even clap. Once when I was in church, the congregation was not giving enough verbal feedback for the preacher so he stopped and asked us: “Are you preaching with me?”

Bilingualism is uneven

The mother tongue of my mechanic in Ghana was Ewe (pronounced eh-vay). He learned English in school. He learned English after learning Ewe and Twi. But he knows the names of car parts in English that I, a native English speaker, don’t know.

A person who learns another language almost always learns it unevenly. They may know all the words needed to talk about grocery shopping (the names of all the fruits and vegetables, etc), all the words for quantity (pound, ounce, bunch, dozen, etc), but not know the words needed to talk about politics, religion or biology. You might speak to someone whose mother tongue is Spanish, for example, and who speaks perfect English only to have the conservation switch to politics or religion and find that the person struggles to communicate. Or you may discover that the person has a deeper vocabulary in English than you do about car parts, or some other specialized topic; because someone who learns another language almost always learns it unevenly

A group of pastors in Africa told a colleague of mine that they literally did not know the words for the spirit world in the language they preached in – a trade language that none of them spoke as their mother tongue. It is usually a mistake to assume that people can understand the Bible in a language in which they can engage in everyday conversation fluently. Maybe they never talk religion in that language and so have never learned the vocabulary associated with religion (such as sin, spirit, and holy).

Example depth of vocabulary

So when it is thought that some group of people are bilingual enough to understand the Bible in a language not their own, I want to test that.