Generosity of God - Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea flag. Photo: clipart-library.com
Persistence and provision: God makes a way
After several years of working on their Old Testament translation, the Tawala translators in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, needed new laptop computers to continue their work. Their team leader, Micah Naugo, was aware of funding that the government allocates to churches and church related projects. So, in November 2022, Micah wrote letters to the office of the governor for the province and the office of their Member of Parliament (MP) requesting assistance for funding to buy new computers. Since it was almost the end of the year, he was told to come back in the New Year. Micah steadfastly followed up his letters expecting a positive response.
In April 2023, Micah visited the office of the Alotau MP once again. This time he had with him a quote from the computer shop for two laptop computers and their accessories. The officer who attended him listened to Micah and then asked him what the computer would be used for. That morning as he left his home, Micah decided to take his tablet. When asked by the officer what he would use the computer for, Micah took out his tablet and opened the Paratext programme and demonstrated to him the translation process. The officer was very impressed and without any further questioning, he proceeded to write a cheque. The amount of the cheque was exactly to the quote by the computer shop for two laptop computers and their accessories. He handed it to Micah. Micah returned to the village and his team that day with two new laptop computers.
Micah is still following up his second letter to the office of the governor for two more computers for the translators’ use. There are more than 10 people involved in the Tawala translation team, which is working on revision of the New Testament (NT) and translation of the Old Testament (OT). Micah said the team needs to be adequately equipped in order to continue with their translation work at a good speed. They aim to complete the NT revision and OT translation in time to launch the full Tawala Bible in 2025. Thanks to the Tawala team’s faithfulness in pursuing this opportunity for special government funding, they have experienced God’s generous provision of the equipment they need to continue toward their goal of completion.
A simple invitation to generosity helps launch a translation project
In October 2022, the Papua New Guinea Bible Translation Association (PNGBTA) launched their first Language Gospel Festival (LGF). Papua New Guinea hosts 12% of the world’s languages. The festival provided an opportunity to celebrate and thank God through song and dance for the 800+ languages he has blessed the country with. During this event, local and international partners were invited to invest into PNGBTA’s strategic plan for establishing 20 new Bible translation projects in the next five years. A young Papua New Guinean lawyer was one of the first to respond to this invitation to reach out to languages still without the Scriptures. The Matsugan language community on Bougainville became the recipient for this gift to start their Bible translation.
Her financial gift assisted the PNGBTA translation personnel to conduct a One-Book workshop on Jonah for the Matsugan people in May. The workshop brought fifteen people from four churches in the Matsugan language community to attend the workshop and learn about translation principles and steps in the Bible translation process. The community worked together to support the two-week workshop by providing housing, meals and other practical assistance. Thanks to the generosity of one individual sharing out of her own God-given blessings, and community members contributing generously as well, the Matsugan now have 25 trial copies of the Book of Jonah to start them off in this journey of translating the Word of life into their heart language.
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05/2025 Global
05/2025 Global
‘We’ve come very far, very fast’
A tech observer outlines what AI will mean soon for workplaces and ministry
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Global
Tech pioneer: Christians ‘have to show up’ for AI
Silicon Valley pioneer Pat Gelsinger was CEO of Intel Corporation until December 2024. Quickly realising his career in technology was not finished, he joined the faith/tech platform Gloo in early 2025 as the executive chair and head of technology. He is also a general partner at the venture capital firm Playground Global. Gelsinger was instrumental in the development of cloud computing, Wi-Fi, USB and many other everyday technologies. He estimates his work has touched 60 to 70 percent of humanity. Here are highlights of his keynote talk at the 2025 Missional AI Summit. You can watch his entire talk here. Pat Gelsinger (left) is interviewed onstage by Steele Billings. Both are with Gloo. Watch the full interview here. Is technology good or bad? Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral. It can be used for good. It can be used for bad. … If you think back to the Roman roads, why did Christ come when he came? I’ll argue the Pax Romana and the Roman roads. … The greatest technology of the day was the Roman road system. It was used so the Word could go out. Historical example I will argue Martin Luther was the most significant figure of the last thousand years. And what did he do? He used the greatest piece of technology available at the day, the Gutenberg printing press. He created Bibles. … He broke, essentially, the monopoly on the Bible translations …. He ushered in education. He created the systems that led to the Renaissance. That’s a little punk monk who only wanted to get an audience with the pope because he thought he had a few theological errors. I’ll argue (Luther was) the most significant figure of the last thousand years, using technology to improve the lives of every human that he touched at the time. How today compares to the dawn of the internet AI is more important. AI will be more significant. AI will be more dramatic. … This is now incredibly useful, and we’re going to see AI become just like the internet, where every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities. In the 75-year-or-so history of computing, we humans have been adapting to the computer. … With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them. They hear us. They see us for the first time. And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity. And for this and so many other reasons that every technology has been building on the prior technology, AI will unquestionably be the biggest of these waves, more impactful even than the internet was. On the need for AI development to be open-source It is so critical because we’re embedding knowledge, embedding values, embedding understanding into those underlying models, large language models and every aspect that happens. It must be open, and this is part of what I think is critical about us being together here today. We need to be creating trusted, open, useful AI that we can build humanity on. On the need for Christians to help build AI systems We have to show up as the faith community to be influencing those outcomes, because remember what happened in the social media. We didn’t show up, and look at what we got. So are we going to miss this opportunity for something that’s far more important than social networking with AI? Where it truly in the models embeds every aspect of human history and values into it? We have to show up, team. What we do with large language models is far more important because truly we are choosing how we embody knowledge of all time into those underlying models. They need to be open. They need to be trusted. What Christians must bring to the process If we’re going to show up to influence AI broadly, we have to show up with good engineering, good data, good understanding, good frameworks. How do you measure things like ‘Is that leading to better character? Is that leading to better relationships? Is that creating better vocational outcomes? Is that a valid view of a spiritual perspective?’ We need good underlying data associated with each one of these. And for that we’re actively involved. We’re driving to create that underlying data set. Because we need to show up with good data if we’re going to influence how AI is created. How should this work? For the AI systems we need to create good benchmarks. If I ask about God, does it give me a good answer or not? If I ask about relationships with my children, does it give me good answers? We need to create the corpus of data to give good answers to those questions. And, armed with that good data, we need to show up to influence the total landscape of AI. We want to benchmark OpenAI. We’re going to benchmark Gemini. We’re going to benchmark Claude. We’re going to benchmark Copilot. This is what we’re going to do at Gloo, but we want to be part of a broader community in that discussion so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI. Technology is a force for good. AI that truly embeds the values that we care about, that we want to honour, that we want to be representing into the future and benchmarking across all of them. Oh his role with Gloo We are going to change the landscape of the faith community and its role in shaping this most critical technology, AI, for faith and flourishing. That’s what we’re going to do at Gloo and we need all of your help and partnership to do so because if we don’t hang together, we’re not going to influence the outcome, right? ‘Here am I, Lord’ I don’t think I’m done. … You and I both need to come to the same position like Isaiah did. Here am I, Lord. Send me. Send me. Send us. That we can be shaping technology as a force for good. That we could grab this moment in time. This is the greatest time to live in human history. We’re going to solve diseases. We’re going to improve lives. We’re going to educate every person in poverty. We are going to solve climate issues. We are going to be using these technologies to improve the lives of every human on the planet. We are going to shape technology as a force for good. Here am I, Lord. Send me. ••• Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance Translated with ChatGPT. How was the translation accuracy? Let us know at info@wycliffe.net. Alliance organisations are welcome to download and use images from this series.
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