In Depth:  Church Mission Society

The first students graduated from groundbreaking St Frumentius’ Anglican College, in Gambella, western Ethiopia in the summer.

For these students, the road to graduation has been especially challenging: two of the seven graduates are refugees and the others are from two different ethnic groups that have a history of conflict. 

In August, a team led by Bob Lunt completed and published a Wichí–Spanish language dictionary to complement the Wichí Bible translation, which was first published in 2002.

The Wichí language, spoken by up to 50,000 people in parts of Argentina and Bolivia, is the most common language of the Mataco-Mataguayan language family.

A team of Bible translators in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, working against the backdrop of civil unrest and religious persecution, have completed the first-ever translation of the whole Bible into the Central Kurdish Sorani language and launched it in April.

For eight years, mission partners have worked alongside indigenous Kurds and other foreign nationals drafting text, checking names, terminology and style, and finally checking both the Old and New Testaments so that they could be published together for the first time as the complete Bible.

In a country that is beginning to see stirrings of opposition to the Christian message, a new initiative to inspire people to evangelise resulted in more than 100 Tanzanian Christians being trained to share the gospel, it was reported in December.

Hundreds of people from the local community attended a two-day open air mission of prayer, healing and preaching.