Pastor’s Book Set St Louis report

We had a whirlwind couple of days at our first regional Pastor’s Book Set conference this weekend. We drove many hours safely up and back, praise God, and had a good time with church and mission leaders up north. Some of them were new to us, and others long-time friends and collaborators, so it was great to get to know the former and catch up with the latter.

I went over to our team leader’s house on Friday mid-morning, and we loaded up the book sets in our truck. Then we headed over to Thies to pick up two teammates, and drove the few hours up to St Louis. We spent the night at the Yoonu Njub ministry center, then held the conference the next day from 9:30-3:30, then drove back to Dakar, and got home at 8:30.

Checking out St Louis after arrival. From left to right are myself, Alex (UK), Andrew (UK), and Birhanu (Ethiopia), all SIM teammates here in Senegal

Each participant received 32 e-books, with half of those being accompanied by audiobook versions. They also received a box of eight physical books, including the African Study Bible from the Centre de Publications Évangéliques in Côte d’Ivoire.

After a five-hour dash back to Dakar after lunch, dropping off our teammates in Thies, I returned home safe and sound to find that Katie and the boys had had an uneventful couple of days with better behavior from the guys than we had expected.

We thank God for the ministry of each of the pastors and church and mission leaders that we were able to see this weekend – and grateful for the hours in the car having fun and talking with our SIM teammates! Thanks for praying us out and back and keep praying for the many leaders working in hard places in Senegal.

Mamadou was a Senegalese scholar and Bible translator who worked with an American member of WorldVenture named Marilyn to translate the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible into Wolof. Several times in the mid-2010s as they translated different books of the Bible, Marilyn’s WorldVenture teammate Steve produced voice recordings of Mamadou reading the Scriptures.

Mamadou’s recordings were phenomenal, especially as he knew the text so well, and he was a great reader as well as writer. His voice expressed tremendous emotion and his storytelling was superb. His dramatization of the conversations between Moses and God at the burning bush makes the text come alive. His renditions of the Psalms in Wolof turn the text into spoken poetry.

Mamadou continued work on the translation and completed the last revision of the New Testament just days before he was admitted to the hospital and passed away in August of 2021.

Now as Marilyn and Corey are nearing the completion of the typesetting of the Wolof Bible, they and Steve are thinking about the importance of having a recording of the whole Bible to include in the Wolof Bible app and for other media such as videos. During the past months, almost every conversation between Corey and the team about audio has begun with a lament that Mamadou isn’t here to complete the recording because he was just so good! It was especially frustrating since they estimate that only about 5% of the final translation differs from the text he recorded. What a waste to have to throw that all away and start over from the beginning! Not to mention the difficulty of having to find another reader who could read as well as Mamadou did…

This past week, we were amazed to hear of an unexpected solution. Corey and Steve had a meeting with someone from the Artificial Intelligence department of a ministry called Faith Comes by Hearing (FCBH). They have an AI tool that can take a book recorded in Mamadou’s voice – say, Genesis – with some number of verses different in the middle, and make a clone of Mamadou’s voice. Then another mother-tongue Wolof speaker can re-record just the verses that have differences from the recorded version. FCBH can clone those re-recorded verses to match Mamadou’s voice, and then we can replace just those missing verses with the new verses. This means that we can keep Mamadou’s amazing voice work and also speed up the release of the final audio Bible books as he had already recorded about a third of the Bible, and going back into the studio to re-record a small percentage of the total will be much faster than re-recording the whole thing! How amazing is that!?

I often think of how God used the roads paved by the Romans, and the increased mobility of that time period, to aid in the spread of the Gospel back in the early days of the church. Now in our own times, we see God using the new technology of our day in a similar way to facilitate the spread of His Word! All Praise to Him!

Please continue to pray for the completion of the typesetting of the Wolof Bible which has taken much longer than expected. Pray for God to send out His Word among Wolof all over Senegal and around the world!  

Corey and Katie

 Thank you all for praying for us! God has answered once again so graciously. The Lord has provided a place for us to live during our upcoming home assignment in the US! Over the weekend, we were contacted by a couple who loves Jesus to ask if our family would like to live in their furnished house for the whole year. Of course, we did not hesitate to accept their kind offer – this is such a huge answer to prayer! And we will be within walking distance of our home church, the Barn! We are overwhelmed with gratitude and relief! Our Father, and His people, are so generous!

We are getting more and more excited to be “home” in Connecticut. Our three girls haven’t been in America since the summer of 2016 and our boys have only had brief winter visits, so this is a huge deal for all of us. We are looking forward to so many things – especially to seeing our friends and family we haven’t seen in so long! This five-year term has at times felt a bit like slogging through a swamp – a mud marathon – but we can now see the finish line approaching! Thanks for praying us through!