In Church-Centric Bible Translation, church leaders who see the need in their language pray, agree on a goal, and form a committee of respected leaders who speak that language. Believers translate into their own language as part of their theological and spiritual formation. A good translation is Clear, Natural, Accurate, and Church-Approved. Many churches start with Open Bible Stories, then check as they go.
Church-Centric Bible Translation (CCBT): a paradigm of Bible translation focused on the establishing and strengthening of a lingual church using a translation process that is led by leaders of the church and done by believers translating into their own language, as an integral part of their theological and spiritual formation. The church-centric paradigm has as its focus the establishing of the church, with Bible translation as a means to that end.
That wording is the test for the steps below: the church translates, with believers working in their own language as part of theological and spiritual formation, still checking the draft for clear, natural, accurate wording while the church affirms it.
This page is for church leaders who see the need in their language: the Word their people can hear, understand, and live by. Those leaders belong to a lingual church: believers who share that language and can take responsibility for the work. If no such church exists yet, planting and establishing the church comes first.
The goal is the growth and maturity of the church: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17, BSB). Translation serves that equipping, and if the church does not use what it produces, it has not met the goal.
The church begins with prayer: leaders gather believers who speak the language, including brothers and sisters from other congregations, and pray for unity, for wisdom, and that God would establish his church. Shared prayer from the start helps the church accept the translation as its own.
Leaders then name the goal, the growth and maturity of the church that speaks the language, because the church needs the Word it can understand, obey, and teach.
The church then selects a translation committee: respected leaders who speak the language, have authority to decide, and are willing to learn. The committee owns the decisions the work requires: what to translate and in what order, which source text, what style and dialect, how checking will happen, and what the church will need to approve the result. Members need not draft every verse.
A translation will serve that goal if it is:
The first three without the fourth still fail the church. Church-Centric Bible Translation: Getting Started and translationAcademy use these four qualities together.
The church translates from a Gateway Language it knows, together with helps in that language: translation notes, checking questions, and original-language tools as believers are able to use them. A majority language and a Gateway Language are different facts, and a source the church cannot read well will not help it.
Open-licensed biblical content matters here because if licenses block the church from translating, adapting, and sharing the source text and the helps, the church cannot start.
Many churches start with unfoldingWord Open Bible Stories. These train believers in the difference between form and meaning, give the church something it can use in evangelism and teaching, and build translation experience before the harder work of Scripture itself, though the committee may begin elsewhere.
Training belongs inside this work because translating is a skill that grows with practice, and the church learns as it drafts and checks. translationAcademy is the handbook for that.
The committee adopts a checking process the church can carry: self and peer review, accuracy checks, community and church-leader review, and whatever else its context requires. Tools can help, but the church still makes the judgment, and making a translation both trustworthy and trusted is part of the work, not a step after it. The church keeps the text while it checks.
unfoldingWord can come alongside with content, tools, and training, and the church still owns the translation.
Nehemiah 8 shows what the church is after. Ezra reads the Law and the Levites explain it, “giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read” (Nehemiah 8:8, BSB). The people then rejoice “because they understood the words that had been made known to them” (Nehemiah 8:12). Hearing, explaining, and understanding belong together, and if translation does not reach understanding, it has not served the church.
Original content © unfoldingWord, CC BY-SA 4.0. Last reviewed 27 August 2026.