Author: David M. Hare

We have experienced a lot of joy in discipling a couple who recently became Christians. They have been together for a few years now and have a son who will be 1 year old in May. When they were baptized they decided that they should not live together until they could be married. We have spent the last few months watching them prepare for the wedding, and they have been giddy! Throughout the whole process it was acknowledged that before they could be officially married the man would have to pay a bride price. A bride price is when the…

One of the very few Christian Kwakum died tonight. He was in a terrible accident which involved at least two children, one of whom died. I played a very small part in helping with the situation as some of our World Team colleagues took the survivors to a hospital in a city about 40 mins from where we live. But as I went to help, I was stopped by some police officers. In spite of my pleas of emergency, they demanded a bribe. They kept me at the police stop for 20 precious minutes. And now that it is over,…

I was once that young, bright-eyed, seminarian. I studied Greek and wondered at how easy it was to translate passages of Scripture that I already had memorized in English. And when I eventually heard that the vast majority of languages in the world (~91%) do not have the entire Bible, I was a bit shocked. I mean, we have had the whole of the canon for about 2,000 years. Surely, it should not be taking this long. How hard could it be? For those of you that are in the same place, or who at least are asking these questions,…

The last few weeks have been hard. It has not been one hard thing, or even something major, just a steady beating of difficulty. In this short period of time our washing machine broke, our remaining solar batteries (the others were stolen) quit charging, I messed up our generator, and our water pump mysteriously stopped pumping altogether (meaning no hot water). We have made a lot of good progress in Bible storying and literacy, but the success has also been marred by critique. It seems there is always someone ready to let me know what they don’t like. We have…

In his daily devotional entitled For the Love of God, Volume 2, DA Carson notes three privileges/responsibilities which ought to characterize the ministry of all those who “teach the Word of God to the people of God.” All three of these responsibilities are reflected in the ministry of Ezra who “had devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the LORD, and to teaching its decrees and laws in Israel” (Ezra 7:10). Carson says that all three aspects of Ezra’s ministry are necessary for anyone who teaches God’s Word, but I would say that this is especially…

Saturday marked the end of our second Oral Bible Storying (OBS) weekend! This is a really exciting time because now, for the first time, we have started to translate biblical content into Kwakum. We have spent a total of two weekends working on the Creation narrative from Genesis 1-2, and currently have a very good draft that we will soon be sending to consultants to check. I thought some of you might want to know what that looked like, and how OBS relates to Bible translation. This post is going to go through what we did for these two weekends,…

When I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out, I was fifteen and the book greatly influenced the circles that ran in. I even went to an event related to the book when I was in highschool. If you are not familiar, Harris presented “courting” as a methodology of seeking romantic relationships rather than “dating”. The overall idea was pretty good: dating in the mainstream sense is self-focused and often temporary, but courting allows parents and others to give input while focusing more on the long-term. However, it ended up for many people to be a set of legalistic rules that, in…

An athletic neighbor once bragged to me that he jogged to a nearby village and back each day. I (a linguist) joked that I only ran when the police were chasing me. He looked at me completely seriously and responded, “Yes, I have seen that you Americans run from the police on TV. Here we just give the police 1,000 francs (about $2) and there is no problem.” It was funny for sure, but also really sad…because it was true. Throughout our entire time here we have heard various stories of injustice. For instance, one of our neighbors was beaten…

My dad recently published a book called When Church Conflict Happens. I have been planning on writing a detailed review, and since Sunday was Father’s Day, I figured it was fitting to do it now. Whereas many of us would like to pretend like church conflict does not happen (at least not in our church), this book demonstrates how to identify different types of conflict, get to the root of it, and deal with it in a biblical and godly way. Keep in mind, the author is my dad, so this is probably not a completely unbiased review, but I…

We are currently getting some beach time here in Cameroon (one of the perks of living in the tropics). At the same time we have begun studying the book of Ecclesiastes as a family. These two facts have resulted in many great discussions with our kids. Just the other day we were out building a sandcastle together on the beach. Moats were dug, walls were mounted, and challenges were hurled at the sea. However, it did not take long for the ocean to riposte with a foamy wave of wrath. As our walls tumbled, Makyra, our oldest daughter, cried out:…