With the completion of the translation of the A Simple Word website, the CSM French project is ready for Phase 2. That phase of the operational plan will be launched this week.

On Saturday morning, August 24, Tom will arrive in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso where he will spend the week with Nebié Badiou. Nebié is the West African representative for Clear and Simple Media. Over the weekend, they will be doing final preparation for the launching of the French website in the capital.

Early in the week, they will be training church leaders on how to best use the site to help their people grow in their faith. The tag line for the site explains how we do that. “We help people read the Bible and help them understand what they read.” Clear and Simple Media was founded upon the belief that if people are exposed to the Bible in a way that is linguistically simple, theologically clear, and biblically faithful, God will use his word to dramatically change their lives.

Burkina Faso will be the first field-testing site. Individuals will be given instruction on how to best respond to the questions and requests that come into the website. The goal is not only to provide good answers to questions, but to help people connect with other believers and churches in their area of the country. After the data is collected in the early months of 2020, CSM hopes to identify and begin train teams to respond to inquirers in a dozen other West African nations.

One mid-term goal is to see the Hear A Story site translated into French as well. Our long-term goal is to translate both sites into Arabic. This would give visitors to the websites the option to read the articles and hear the stories in English, French, or Arabic.

Tom will also visit one other West African country before his return. According to Operation World, this Arabic-speaking country of 32 million people is 99.88% Muslim. There are 30 separate people groups in the country. Eighty percent are categorized as unreached.