A New Page for the Luganda Bible Project

The word of God is going into Luganda, and you can now watch the work as it happens: a new page on our website follows every book, every review, and every report from the men doing the work.

“The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it” (Psalm 68:11).

Sixty-Six Books in Hand

For years we have asked you to pray for the translation of the King James Bible into Luganda, the tongue of the Buganda people of Uganda. Prayer is easier when you can see what you are praying for. So we have built a page that shows the whole work at a glance, and it is now on our church website:

This same button is now permanently at the top of our website, on every page, so the work is never more than one click away.

The initial translation of all sixty-six books, Genesis to Revelation, is finished. Every chapter of the Bible, all 1,189 of them, now exists in Luganda. What remains is the careful review that makes a translation trustworthy, and that review is the long part of the labor.

How the Work Is Done

No book rests on one man’s judgment. Each book begins as two independent translations, made separately and then unified at the first review. From there it passes through three levels of review and a final reading. By the time a book is counted complete, six different men have worked through it, and no verse has passed on the judgment of one man alone.

That slowness is not a defect. A Bible is not a pamphlet, and the men handling it know what they are handling. When the page tells you a book is finished, it means that book has been read, weighed, and read again by men who fear God, until they were satisfied.

What the Page Shows You

At the top are the plain numbers: how far the reviews have come, how many books are finished, and how many chapters are done. As I write, the reviews are forty percent complete, with Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus complete through the final reading and forty-one books past the first review.

Below that is the work in hand: the book and chapter each review team has reached. When you pray for this work, you can pray for the men in the very chapters they are in.

Then comes a chart of all sixty-six books, each one colored by the stage it has reached. Point at a stage, or click it, and the books at that stage stand out from the rest. In one look you can see the whole Bible moving from left to right, stage by stage, toward completion.

Last is a full table, book by book, with the chapter count, the stage reached, and the date it was reported. Nothing is estimated and nothing is rounded; the page records what the reports say, and a line at the bottom tells you when it was last updated.

How to Use It

Visit the page once a month, or whenever you think to pray for Uganda. Look first at the work in hand, and pray for the men in the chapters named there. Watch the finished count, and when a book crosses the line, thank God for it; each one is years of labor ending in a settled text. And show the page to your children. Let them see that the Bible on their lap did not fall from the sky in English, and that there are men alive today giving their years so that a Buganda father can read to his family in the tongue he thinks in.

Paul wrote from prison that “the word of God is not bound” (2 Timothy 2:9). It is not bound by chains, and it is not bound by language. It is going into Luganda a chapter at a time, and the page is our window on its going.

Pray for the translators at their tables. Pray for the reviews now under way, that every book may come through them settled and sure. And pray for me, as I guide and fund this project to its end, Lord willing. Pray it through to the last book.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com