News

Beth Anne Erickson works in Estonia. With the recent crisis that has resulted from the war in the Ukraine, refugees have moved from Poland, through Latvia and Lithuania, then to Estonia. Beth has used our material in English, Ukrainian, and Russian as the ministry she is a part of encounters larger numbers of people moving…

Pastor Dallas Rempel is on the staff of the Hillsdale Baptist Church in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The church has been using Clear and Simple Media material for several years in a variety of ministries. The church has used our book, Simple Stories, to teach English and to introduce the story of Jesus to people who…

For several months now, we have been working with translators to put our book, Travel Guide to the Bible, into Burmese and Mizo-Chin for the church in Myanmar. If you have been following world news, Myanmar’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested after the country’s military seized power in February 2021. The event…

Website Developments We are now in the process of combing the two CSM delivery sites, Hear A Story and A Simple Word. Although we have experienced several snags which have delayed the project by six months, we are getting close to activating the new site. After three months of field-testing in English, we will begin…

I hope this does not sound strange to my Christian readers. Yes, the Russian leadership today is orchestrating a war in the Ukraine. But we make a serious mistake when we believe that the entire Russian population (146,000,000) favors what is happening. They were not given a vote. Nor will their opinion be sought. Many…

The war in the Ukraine is now in its third week. Since February 24, 2022, more than 2.6 million Ukrainians have crossed a foreign border as refugees or have become internally displaced. The nation needs your prayers. In 2019, during a trip to Canada, we visited a Ukrainian-speaking congregation in Saskatoon. The leaders had seen…

More than 1.45 million people have left Ukraine since Russia invaded the country 10 days ago, the International Organization for Migration said on Saturday, sparking what the United Nations agency described as the fastest and largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II. This ”diaspora” is bringing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to…

If you are having difficulty reading the headline, likely you are not from Afghanistan. Afghan Persian, or Dari, is also commonly referred to as Farsi. There are many historical and political reasons for the naming variants, but Dari is spoken by over 70% of Afghans as a first or second language. Dari can also be…

Over the past few months we have been designing social media posts for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.  We are hoping that people who see these would be curious about the posts and connect with our websites through the links provided.  What about you? Have you seen any of these posts? We would appreciate it if…

Every endeavor needs a champion. What is a champion? A champion is someone with a deep belief in the value of a project or cause, which generates in them a personal passion, which results in a tenacious commitment to that cause’s success, and whose influence on others puts the wind in the sails necessary to…

Several months ago, we were asked to provide an internship opportunity for a student doing graduate work in Biblical Languages and Translation. Her desire was to craft a graduate project that would apply Controlled English to build Bible lessons for new English readers. Her work would focus on two of the ‘less familiar’ Old Testament…

Myanmar, also known as Burma, is in South East Asia. It neighbors Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, China, and India. With a population of about 54 million, most of whom are Burmese speakers. Many would also speak traditional, tribal languages like Karen or Chin. The biggest city is Yangon (Rangoon). The main religion is Buddhism. Clear and…

For some months now, Clear and Simple Media (CSM) has been a partnership with the 6° Initiative. The 6° Initiative (6DI) is a ministry of Converge IM and is one of their major initiatives in Africa. 6DI is a church planting movement focusing on the unreached people groups just north of the equator in West Africa. This area…

 Over the past number of years, we have been involved in dozens of projects. God has allowed us to accomplish much, for which we are thankful. We write and edit, translate and design, publish and distribute, develop story sets, conduct training, consult with mission agencies, present seminars. Very few of those projects have followed a…

The country of Estonia is in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. Estonia has a population of 1.3 million people.  The country shares borders with Latvia and Russia and is just across the Baltic Sea from Finland and Sweden. Look back into the country’s history and you will find early influences of Christianity. But today, Estonia…

Just a few weeks after we returned from two years of leading a church planting team in Vietnam, I found myself in Africa. I was asked to travel to Banfora, Burkina Faso to help build a story set with a CRU team from StoryRunners. Twenty-four Jula speakers, two westerners, and four African translators spent 6…

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled, “Why Does it Take So Long?” It discussed the realities of translation and featured a summary of Emily Lupfer’s article: “5 Reasons Why Google Can’t Translate the Bible.” As I was telling someone about our newest translation projects for Afghanistan, those same questions were raised….

Over the past 10 years, some of our projects have been the result of working to build relationships that slowly grow into opportunities for ministry. But a large number of our projects have come to us unexpectedly. The books somehow “escape” and, as a result of things we could not have planned, our books end…

Have you travelled to a far away place? Have you gone on a trip to a place that you had never been before? That kind of trip can be fun. But you can get lost on a journey like that. That is why the best way to travel to a new place is to have…

Clear and Simple Media does a worldwide outreach through our book distribution in 48 languages in more than 40 countries and through our delivery websites. But occasionally, we climb in a vehicle and go on the road. During a recent trip that included Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho, we found ourselves at…

One of the ways to assess one’s progress is to mark milestones. Last year, in August of 2020, we were able to count another one – the completion of the initial Arabic translation of the Travel Guide to the Bible. That, of course, is not the final step in our process. Because we believe that…

We are often asked, in a sentence or two, to summarize the work of Clear and Simple Media. We have developed a few, short sentences to help us do that. One is, “We write books and tell stories in simple English.” The other, and most often used, is; “We help people read the Bible and…

If you have been following our news section for any length of time, you know that our ministry, while focussed on producing tools in simple English, is not limited to one language. Our ultimate goal is to have all of our material, including our websites, in as many languages as possible. In fact, one of…

In 2015, several likeminded leaders met to discuss the need to build unity among leaders involved or interested in Native/First Nations ministry. As a result of those conversations, the United in Christ Conference was born. Co-sponsored by Oak Hills Center for Indian Ministries and CHIEF, Inc., the first conference was held in 2017 at Oak Hills…

Several months ago, Clear and Simple Media announced the completion of a set of 1,500 questions to accompany our Travel Guide to the Bible. The questions are primarily ‘comprehension questions’ to assure that the readers understand the basic content. After those questions were checked for readability, the question set was sent to a set of…