Jude 2

I am trying to take seriously the great commission and to do it and model it. Last week, I created a Chinese and English gospel tract, of a sort, and delivered it as a personalized letter to a waitress at a local Chinese restaurant who I have struck up a customer-ly friendship with in the past 8 months. She is a poor English speaker. I sit here now at lunch to eat and to visit with her after specially delivering the letter to her last Friday afternoon.

I will relate more later, maybe, but, here is my question:

1. Do you recommend a particular Chinese and English parallel bible? I have a call in as I type to the local Lifeway store for one, but all they have in stock is a Chinese bible. My friend wants an English bible, she is an ESL student, says "I believe" and holds up her cross necklace, but has no good command after five years of ESL of written English. I thought a parallel bible would be of real help..... But.....

2. If she is a poor reader after this long in ESL, she may need a basic phonics path to reading. I have a phonics book with 100 lessons to reading English on a basic level. It is how I taught my daughter to read. I explained this to my friend, and that it should be helpful for anyone who is not a natural English reader. I do not want her to feel like a child, and I explained that other. I offered, and she accepted, to try a few lessons as I will bring them to her. We will see. The Holy Spirit can teach her English, I know. You know what I mean.

3. Do you have any recommendations in these matters or other thoughts?

THANKS!

I realized after posting that I might explain how I created that letter. I do not know Mandarin.

I went to a website that translates 300 English characters at a time to Simplified Chinese. It took about an hour. You really have to work to simplify the syntax in English without oversimplifying the gospel in 300 character chunks.

It worked, though, obviously, because her first statement to me after getting me some sweet tea today was "Are you a pweacha?" Laughed and said, "No. I am a lawyer." She looked at me kind of strangely and I said, "But I AM a Christian." And we both laughed. Lawyer jokes are apparently universal languages of their own.

I produced a Chinese translation of my English letter, printed both out, stapled them together and placed them in an envelope, and came in and handed it to her last Friday. I will be glad to give it for review and critique if anyone speaks Chinese. It just seemed like the thing to do. For all I knew, I typed out Chinese instructions on how to change oil in a Ford Pinto. Since she didn't ask me if I wanted 10W 40 in my tea, I think it made sense.

THIS is what I want to do. Just saying.

There are numerous dialects of Chinese language, Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese... do you happen to know which she speaks?

I have people at my church who speak Mandarin and Taiwanese.

She mentioned Mandarin. The letter I printed was in "simplified Chinese" and I am ignorant on what dialect it is most akin to. Yen (my new friend's name) understood it though.

It is odd, but I contacted a local church in Huntsville that is primarily Chinese, asking them for their help, and have no response. It was their outreach pastors that I had emailed. Maybe they are suspicious. I don't know how to overcome that.

dolfan wrote:...I contacted a local church in Huntsville that is primarily Chinese, asking them for their help, and have no response. It was their outreach pastors that I had emailed. Maybe they are suspicious. I don't know how to overcome that.

Ethnic churches can be a bit hard to crack... sometimes suspicious of outsiders.

Great news! Huntsville Chinese Christian Church responded to my email with some immediately helpful information. I will share it with Yen tomorrow, I hope. For anyone's reference, there is an online English-Chinese bible at www.bbintl.org . Yen is an iPhone user and relies on it a bit, she said. This is good news for her to have a bilingual bible at hand.

And, I scored an invitation to attend one of their services, which I may do soon just to see it.