“Do you want to meet the Michael Jordan of Bible translation?”
It was early in the 2010s, and Jordan Monson was a low-level Bible translation intern. He was attending a conference when a friend posed that question to him.
Unsure who it might be, Monson assented to the offer and was understandably surprised when he turned to see an English woman in her early 70s with a bit of a limp walking toward him.
“I noticed around the room as all of these senior leaders … the whole room just stopped … and everyone just looked to her and, one by one, these incredibly important people walked up to her,” Monson recalled, jokingly adding, “The only way they could show more reverence is if they bowed; it was crazy.”
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Needless to say, the burgeoning scholar was determined to learn more about Dr. Katharine Barnwell. And he quickly discovered she is one of the most influential missionaries people have never heard of.
In the West, notoriety is seen as a byproduct of influence — but that’s not always the case. In fact, Barnwell’s obscurity spins that aforementioned assumption on its head: her ambiguity in the greater “evangelical industrial complex,” as Monson called it, is because she was busy working, mostly in West Africa, to make Scripture accessible to people who had never heard the Gospel.
“She sort of slipped away from the limelight, or she was never noticed,” he said. “But if you look at the number of people in the world who have become Christians, largely because of her work, there is a very real claim to her having more than 100 times the influence of Billy Graham. [It’s] just incredible.”
In the years since that conference where he first encountered Barnwell, Monson has become a true student of her work.
He is the author of a forthcoming biography about the notable missionary, “Katharine Barnwell: How One Woman Revolutionized Modern Missions,” releasing April 29 and available now for pre-order.
As missionary work has shifted away from solely an export of the Western world, reorienting around the global church, Barnwell’s quiet influence has left an indelible mark.
“All around the missions world, people were looking to lift up the nations, lift up the global church, and say, ‘The Westerners have been doing this for 400-some years, with some success and also with some major blindspots along the way.’ … It was time to pass the baton and hand it off to the local church,” Monson explained. “Katy Barnwell … trained the world to translate the Scriptures for themselves.”
Barnwell, 87, is the pioneer of the “mother-tongue” translation method of the Bible. Having spent a great deal of her career in Nigeria, the faithful linguist centered her work on establishing a system for communities to access the Old and New Testaments in their heart languages.
Her technique, now known as the Barnwell Translation Method, is used extensively and mostly, as it was designed, by non-professional translators. The goal of the system is threefold: to accurately communicate biblical meaning, to employ natural and clearly understood language, and to remain steadfastly faithful to the intent of the original text.
With a team of community translators, Barnwell’s method relies on the source text’s original languages (mostly Greek and Hebrew), focuses on meaning- and ideas-based translation (as opposed to word-for-word translation), and then, to sure up the precision of the translation, requires drafts to be back-translated into major languages (like English or French). The system also features exhaustive linguistic and exegetical workshops to equip local translators with the tools they need to achieve their goal.
Despite her unprecedented success and indisputable contribution to Bible translation, Monson described Barnwell, who still works in linguistics, as “maybe the most humble person I’ve ever met,” recalling, for example, how bothered she was to even see her face on the cover of her biography.
That exchange, he said, is emblematic of her whole life philosophy.
“She just works tirelessly for the good of people around the world and thinks so little about herself that she’s almost offended when she’s remembered,” Monson said. “She kept insisting the whole time, ‘Everything I did, I did on teams; I don’t know why this whole book is just about me.’”
That attitude — Barnwell’s counterintuitive humility — has served as a deep encouragement to Monson.
“What does it look like to be laser-focused on the Kingdom, laser-focused on the spreading of the Good News of Jesus while having a complete self-forgetfulness about your own person?” he reflected.
You can watch our full conversation with Monson in the “Faith vs. Culture” episode below:
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