Recipients of the newly translated Bible with Archbishop Joseph Garang Atem Zorial, former Bishop of Renk, who played a major role in the translation project.
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, Virginia rejoiced to learn that 300 copies of a new translation of the Bible – decades in the making — into the Dinka Cam language were received by Bishop Simon Chuang at St. Mathew’s Cathedral in Renk, South Sudan, just before Pentecost this year, allowing thousands of people to hear of God’s saving acts in their own language.
Among the 60 indigenous language groups of South Sudan, speakers of Dinka (also known as Jieng) are the most numerous, and Cam is an important dialect of the Dinka language. St. Mary’s, along with St. Paul’s Church in Alexandria, Virginia has prayed for these Bible translators since 2002, when the rector, Andrew Merrow, and Russell Randle, a lawyer, visited them at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The visitors saw translators carefully checking portions of their work with speakers of various Dinka dialects. Persevering until 2023 through relocations and the deaths of some translators, receiving publication assistance from Wycliffe Bible Translators, in the fall of 2025 a total of 30,000 copies of the complete Dinka Cam Bible were delivered to Juba, the capital of South Sudan.
Elsewhere, an ongoing effort to put the Bible into the Burun language suffered a setback. Russ Hersman of Wycliffe Bible Translators has worked for many years with Canon Nabil Abdalla, Director of the ECS Translation Department. Most recently they have been laboring to complete the Bible in Burun. The Burun are a Nilotic people numbering about 50,000, who live primarily in the Blue Nile State of Sudan with some elements residing in South Sudan. Working under the auspices of Bishop Simon Farajalla Mahdi of Wad Medani Diocese in Sudan, they were within six months of finishing the Burun New Testament, when civil war broke out in 2023. The translation team was recently obliged to regroup in Juba, South Sudan, to finish the task. At the end of June, Canon Nabil reported that US $8,500 just withdrawn from the bank to fund the Burun and other translation projects was lost when a team member’s bag was snatched by a thief, possibly an inside job. Nabil just heard that his son in Cairo, married in January, has been taken to prison. Another son in Cairo has disappeared. Nabil thinks he and some other friends may have tried to escape to another country. The situation in Egypt is no longer safe for Sudanese refugees.
Russ Herman prays, “Heavy burdens. Lord God of the universe, you know all things. Please make things right for our dear brothers and sisters who are suffering.”