Pray for Bible Access: Hearing God Speak
Pray for each person to find the Word of God in their own heart language and to understand and apply it.
Having scriptures is crucial: The Bible is the authority for believers and churches in every gospel movement. Even if the Bible is primarily shared through oral storytelling, it is crucial to guide obedience and doctrine. Faith comes by hearing God’s Word and transformation comes by obeying it.
Great progress has been made: As this chart shows of the 7382 languages, 2,326 (720+1606) have the New Testament available, covering over 90% of the world’s population. And, on each of the 31 profile pages there is listed information on the access that group has to the Bible. Some for these largest groups were done a long time ago, but recently many have been updated or put into easy to read versions. For a complete list of bible translations and resources go to: https://joshuaproject.net/languages/prs#resources or https://find.bible/languages/.
Pray for both written and audio versions of Scripture. Many people today, especially in Frontier People Groups, prefer to access the Holy Scriptures on their phones rather than carry conspicuous books. Oral Scripture in heart languages are essential for the gospel to spread easily, to be fully heard, understood, and received, and for heart transformation to occur.
Blessing families with Scripture: Pray for God’s Word to spread rapidly and be honored by all. Pray for many to base their lives on Jesus and his Word, being obedient doers, not forgetful hearers. Ask God to exalt his Word among every Frontier People Group through having modern language scriptures they can understand by reading and/or listening by 2025 (2 Th 3:1; Eph 4:16).
Pray for Literacy: A Bridge to Hope
The benefits of literacy are many: Literacy creates opportunities to learn and develop skills that will help people provide for their family, and bring social and economic development to their community. Literacy can benefit health and decrease infant mortality rates significantly and help people gain access to education and government programs. Not only does literacy help people to read the scriptures, but whole communities can be raised out of poverty by becoming literate in their own language and in trade languages.
Great progress has been made: Only 12% of the world’s people could read in 1820, and now 86% can read. However, the poorest people are often the least educated and least literate. Over 75% of the world’s 781 million illiterate adults live in South Asia, West Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa and most are women. Even those who can read often don’t read well, especially if there are few written things in their language.
Blessing families with literacy: Adult literacy is low in many of the largest FPGs, and could be a way to bless families. Training in how to train adults quickly to read their own language is available with primers for all the languages of the 31 largest FPGs at https://www.literacyevangelism.org/ These primers can also help expat workers learn to read the languages they are learning in Frontier People Groups.
Pray for many workers to gain the vision of using adult literacy training as a bridge into FPGs. Pray for local believers to be trained to teach literacy to their own people. Pray for many families to be blessed as the mothers and fathers, and other family members, learn to read and learn to love the scriptures.