Our initial experience with making tracts to send overseas was with the Good News / Bad News tract. After printing thousands of these and sending them overseas, we got word from our missionary in Uganda that it would be helpful to have some tracts in their native languages: Swahili and Ugandan. Around the same time, we were working on some ideas for Spanish tracts. Praying about all of this lead us to develop the God’s Way / Man’s Way tract. The idea was a tract based on the format of the Good News / Bad News tract but with text that could be translated into other languages. The tract still had no cultural ties, so should be applicable in a number of countries. While the tract was still an idea in our heads, we also got a request for a French resource for use in Cameroon.
We wrote the English version first. I have a friend who lives in the south of France. I asked him to translate into French and he did. We have another friend who had done a Spanish translation for us, so we asked her to translate the tract to Spanish.
We were searching for someone who could translate the tract into Swahili and kept coming up empty. One day I was talking to Pastor Tony at Empowerment Christian Center in Farmers Branch. He asked me what was new with the ministry. I started telling him about this tract and the dilemma of translating into Swahili. He said, “Brother Carl, Swahili is my native language, if you don’t let me do this translation, the Lord will chastise me!” Two days later we had the text in Swahili.
My son did the layout of the tracts in English, Spanish, French and Swahili. We sent the English, French and Swahili to the printer. By the time they arrived we also had other requests for the tracts in Swahili. First, Pastor Tony himself was going on a mission trip with his church to Kenya. So we sent some of the tracts with him. Another brother in Christ would be going to Kenya later in the year on a separate trip. So we gave a thousand of the tracts to him to take with him. The reports I’ve had from him are “I should have brought more of those Swahili tracts!”
One night while putting on the Basic Evangelism Training Seminar, one of the participants said, “what resources do you have in Portuguese?” I said we did not have any, but explained we had this tract that we had already translated to some other languages. She offered to translate it into Portuguese. Those tracts were printed and delivered to her Brazilian church here in the Dallas area.
We have sensed a need to have a tract in Arabic. And then some brothers in Christ on Facebook have asked for tracts in Urdu. Again, we started praying for the people needed to do these translations. Eventually, I connected with a pastor who leads a service in Urdu right here in Carrollton. Through a connection within that church, I met a man who can oversee the translation to Urdu and Arabic as well. God is so good to keep providing these resources. We hope to have the Urdu and Arabic versions soon and then will get those printed.
It is really exciting to see how God is moving. The translators have come along just when needed. God is clearly moving in ways that we can not have orchestrated on our own.
We still have an outstanding prayer request to find someone to translate into Ugandan. If you can do it, please contact me.
