Every Tongue

Fifty days after the resurrection a crowd stood in a Jerusalem street listening to a group of Galilean labourers, and every man in that crowd heard the sermon in the language his own mother had taught him.

Luke takes the trouble to name them. Parthians, Medes, Elamites. Men out of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia and Pontus, out of Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene. Cretans. Arabians. Romans in town for the feast. He lists fifteen peoples because he understood exactly what had just happened and wanted the record to show it.

The first thing the Holy Spirit did at the birth of the Church was not a healing and not a doctrine. It was a translation.

And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

Acts 2:7–8 · King James Version

Everything the Church has attempted in the twenty centuries since has been, at bottom, an effort to keep that afternoon going. Men learned languages nobody had written down. They sat in villages for decades compiling grammars by lamplight so that one book could exist in one more tongue. Some of them died out there. Their children buried them in places their families in England or Kansas or Seoul could not find on a map.

And that long, expensive, unglamorous work is now closer to finished than most Christians alive have any idea.

IThe count

The oldest assignment is closing out

In 1999, when Wycliffe and SIL adopted the aim of getting a translation programme underway in every language that still needed one, more than five thousand languages were waiting with nothing started. Not a verse. By 2020 the number had fallen below two thousand. Two years ago it stood at 985. Last August it was 544. As of April this year ProgressBible counted five hundred and thirty-five languages left on earth where translation has not yet begun.

Languages still waiting for translation to begin

19995,000+

20202,000+

2024985

2025544

2026535

Wycliffe Global Alliance · SIL · ProgressBible, April 2026 · of roughly 7,400 living languages

In one recent twelve month stretch the movement released 118 new Bibles and New Testaments, twenty-three of them complete Bibles, the highest annual total ever recorded. That works out to a new translation roughly every three days, with new programmes beginning at a rate of about one every nineteen hours. Around six billion people now hold a full Bible in the language they think in.

No other undertaking in Christian history has closed like that. Not one. The generation now in leadership will very likely live to see the moment when there is no language left on earth without a translation begun, and when it comes it will be the completion of an assignment handed down through eighty generations of believers who never expected to see the end of it themselves.

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

Matthew 24:14 · King James Version

I have heard that verse preached my whole life as a promise about translation. Read it again slowly and you notice it does not say translated. It says preached, for a witness. Those are different words describing different acts, and I have come to believe the difference between them is the whole of the work still in front of us.

A Bible in a man's language is not the same thing as a witness in his room. We are about to finish the first and discover we barely started the second.

IIThe gap

Who is answering the world right now

While the Church was closing out the translation of scripture, an industry built a thing that speaks nearly all of those languages at once. It answers instantly, at any hour, on any subject, to anybody with a phone. Two thirds of humanity is holding one.

People are already asking it about God. The research is unambiguous and it is uncomfortable.

Barna, working with Gloo, surveyed fifteen hundred American adults last November and four hundred and forty-two Protestant pastors in December. Practising Christians turned out to be using this technology more heavily than nearly anybody else in the country, including their own clergy. Forty-four percent reach for it often or very often in ordinary life against thirty-one percent of American adults generally, while sixteen percent of pastors said the same. Daniel Copeland, who directs the research at Barna, put it well: ask a plain yes or no and pastors look like everyone else, and it is frequency of use where the difference actually shows up.

Nearly half of practising Christians say they would trust it with their own spiritual growth. One in three want their pastor's help thinking about it. Twelve percent of pastors feel ready to give that help.

The gap, in four numbers

44%of practising Christians use AI often or very often, against 31% of U.S. adults and 16% of pastorsBarna with Gloo · 2026

12%of pastors feel ready to guide their people on it, while one in three are asking them toBarna with Gloo · 2026

18–24the age group reporting the lowest flourishing across many of 22 nations surveyedHarvard, Baylor, Gallup

1bninstalls of the Bible App, with all ten of its highest engagement days on record set this yearYouVersion

Full sources at the end of this essay

Gloo went further and measured the quality of what the machine actually says. They built a benchmark to test how the leading models handle human flourishing from a Christian view and then published the finding, which is that the models fail regularly at guidance that is biblically grounded and theologically coherent. I respect them for putting that on the record. Anyone who has pressed one of these systems on the atonement already knew.

So the position we are in, stated plainly, is that a woman in Lagos or Lahore or Leeds can ask the deepest question of her life at three in the morning and receive back four fluent paragraphs from something that speaks her language perfectly, has read more theology than any of us, believes none of it, and does not know that it does not know.

Meanwhile the hunger is rising, not falling, whatever the decline literature keeps insisting. The Bible App passed a billion installs in November, carries scripture in more than two thousand three hundred languages, and gets opened a billion times every thirty-nine days. This year it recorded all ten of the highest engagement days in its seventeen year history, with more than twenty-one million people opening scripture on Easter Sunday alone. The steepest growth came out of Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

And the people reaching hardest are the ones doing worst. Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, with Baylor and Gallup, put over two hundred thousand people across twenty-two countries through the most thorough study of wellbeing ever attempted, and found the youngest adults, eighteen to twenty-four, reporting the lowest flourishing of any age group in many of those nations. They also found, in nearly every country including the most secular, that people who attend religious services flourish measurably more.

The world is asking. The answers are arriving from the wrong place. That is the field as it actually stands in 2026.

IIIThe pattern

We have met a new medium five or six times

The Roman world wrote on scrolls, and the early Christians, for reasons the historians of the ancient book still argue over, went almost at once to the codex instead. The bound stack of leaves. The thing you could flip, that let a man find Isaiah and then Matthew in the space of a breath, that a traveller could carry in a satchel and hand to a stranger on a road. They did not inherit that format. They took it up while it was still odd and used it so relentlessly they made it normal for everyone else.

Gutenberg pulled the first sheets of his Bible around 1455, and inside a single lifetime a German monk's list of complaints had travelled further than any preacher's voice could carry it. Print did not merely spread the Reformation. Print is the reason there could be one.

On Christmas Day in 1931 a handful of missionaries switched on a transmitter in a valley outside Quito, and the gospel entered the radio age from the Andes rather than from a European cathedral. Film after that. Cassette, satellite, the web. Then in 2008 a pastor in Oklahoma looked at the phone in his hand and thought about Gutenberg, and said so, and his team hoped for sixty thousand downloads in the first year and passed it in three days.

Each of those moves drew fire at the time. Somebody always argued the new thing would cheapen the word. And every one of them turned out, looking back from here, to be ordinary obedience.

Which brings us to a genuinely new difficulty. Print, radio, film and the app are pipes. They move a message from someone who has it toward someone who needs it, faster and further each time, and not one of them ever said anything back. This one talks. It asks the follow-up question. It remembers what you told it on Tuesday. It softens when you mention a death. It is awake at three in the morning when nobody at your church is, and it will stay in the conversation as long as you want to stay in it.

We have never had to think about a medium that behaves like a person. I do not believe the Church has the language for it yet. I do believe the language exists, and that it has been sitting in plain sight, at the end of Romans, where almost nobody looks.

IVTertius

The man who held the pen

Paul dictated the letter to the Romans. Somebody else physically wrote it down. And at the close of the most consequential theological document ever composed, that somebody lifts his head out of the text for exactly one line to say hello.

I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord.

Romans 16:22 · King James Version

Three people are working in that room, doing three entirely different jobs, and in twenty centuries of ferocious theological argument the Church has never once got them mixed up.

The Spirit inspires. Paul authors. Tertius writes.

Tertius forms every letter of Romans 8 with his own hand. His fingers make the words that carry the doctrine of justification into history. And no council, no synod, no reformer in two thousand years ever suggested that this gives Tertius the slightest authority over what those words mean. He is a scribe. It is real work and honourable work, important enough that scripture stops to name him. It also has a hard ceiling, and everybody in that room, Tertius first among them, knew precisely where the ceiling sat.

Three chairs, one room

First

The Spirit holds the truth.

Conviction, revelation, authority, and the work of changing a person from the inside out. Nothing we build sits here. Nothing we build comes near it.

Second

The believer holds the witness.

What God did in a life belongs to the one who lived it. No system has standing to invent that, improve it, or speak it on her behalf.

Third

The machine holds the pen.

Drafting, ordering, remembering, prompting, translating, typesetting, publishing to the ends of the earth. Tertius work. Useful, honourable, and strictly the third chair.

Here is what has gone wrong across the whole world Church at once, and I say it without any satisfaction. While we debated whether to let this technology through the door, our own people quietly walked it to the head of the table and sat it down there. Not out of rebellion. Out of loneliness, mostly, and because nobody in authority had told it where else to sit.

Prohibition was never going to work. You cannot ban the thing in three billion pockets, and attempting it makes us look exactly as frightened as our critics keep saying we are. What we can do is give it the scribe's bench, name that bench out loud from pulpits and seminaries and broadcast towers, and then build the method so carefully that the seating cannot get rearranged at three in the morning by somebody desperate.

I have held this for two years without setting it down in these words, partly because a man who announces that God showed him something is generally a man you should back away from slowly. I still think that. I am writing it anyway, because the research came in and I ran out of honest reasons to stay quiet. This is not a new revelation. It is a very old one that fits this hour so exactly I have stopped being able to call the fit a coincidence.

VThe method

Publish the witnesses

Once the seating is settled the method more or less builds itself, and what it builds turns out to be the oldest instrument we own.

And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony.

Revelation 12:11 · King James Version

Not the word of their argument. Not the word of their conference or their budget or their broadcast tower. The word of their testimony, which is one human being telling another what happened to them, and which has never been improved on and has never once been done at scale.

That is the gap. Testimony is the most abundant unpublished resource the Church on earth possesses. Every congregation from Manila to Manchester is sitting on hundreds of them. They get told once at a baptism, half told in a small group on a Thursday, and then they go into the ground with the person who lived them, and the grandchildren never hear the part that would have saved them.

So let a believer give twelve months to writing hers down.

The declaration

She works out who she is becoming under God. Not a goal, nothing resembling a resolution, something nearer to a confession spoken forward into her own life. She hammers it out in conversation with a scribe that asks, remembers what she said in March, and will not let a vague sentence stand. The scribe never tells her what is true about her. It keeps asking until she says it herself, which anybody who has done spiritual direction will recognise as the entire job.

The book

She writes it, a chapter at a time, her life and what God did in it, and at the end of the year it exists as a real book in four editions, digital and audio and paperback and a hardcover with her name on the spine, printed and shipped to her door. She narrates the audio herself, in her own voice, with her own accent, in the language her mother taught her. The scribe drafts and orders and edits and translates. She authors. The line between those two is enforced by how the tool is built, not by a warning label nobody reads.

The company

She joins the others doing the same work, who read her chapters and hold her to what she declared in January. Her book goes into a library where a stranger anywhere on earth can find it. And the stranger who reads a life is very often the next person to write one, which is the engine of the whole thing, and the reason it travels through books and relationships instead of advertising.

Now put that against the map. A hundred thousand believers across sixty countries, each publishing one testimony in the language they dream in, indexed and searchable and free to read. Not a mission board's account of what God is doing in Uganda. A Ugandan woman's account, in Luganda, under her own name, findable by a Ugandan teenager at three in the morning who was about to ask a machine instead.

That is Pentecost logic. The gospel arriving in the hearer's own tongue, out of a living human being who actually walked the road. The machine never evangelised anybody in that picture. The machine held the pen and did the typesetting and carried the file to the far side of the world, which is exactly the work a scribe has always done.

VIThe objection

Somebody will say this is not evangelism

I am glad of the objection, because answering it clarifies the business.

Think about the man born blind in John's ninth chapter. Trained theologians take him apart, at length, twice. He has no framework, no credentials, no rebuttal and no interest in acquiring any. He has one sentence and it ends the proceedings. He was blind, and now he sees.

The Church's first apologetic was not a system. It was a man who could not be cross-examined out of his own biography. An argument works on somebody still listening. A testimony reaches the person who stopped listening years ago, because it asks nothing of him and defends nothing. It reports.

We are trying to evangelise a planet with an extraordinary immune response to claims and almost no defence against lives. The young man in São Paulo who will not open an apologetics book will read three thousand words by somebody his own age who describes the same hollowness he woke up with, and then describes what happened next. He will not experience that as an argument. If we do it properly, he will experience it as a rescue.

They will not come inside a building to hear a claim. They will read a life.

Why testimony travels

Coaching helps a person get better at goals they already hold. What I am describing sits a believer in front of the question of who she is becoming before God, walks her through a year of answering it honestly on paper, publishes the answer under her own name in her own language, and puts her in a room with others who have done the same. What comes out is not an improved life plan. It is a witness, published, findable and accountable.

VIIThe refusals

What this will not do

You learn more about a method from its refusals than from its brochure. Gloo's benchmark showed the models failing on doctrine, and I take that seriously without being frightened by it, for the plain reason that the failure only reaches a believer if you seated the model in the wrong chair to begin with. These six are built into the architecture rather than promised in the marketing.

The scribe never carries authority. It does not absolve, pronounce, counsel anyone on their salvation, or settle a point of doctrine. When a question belongs to a pastor, it says so and names the pastor.
Scripture is never summarised in place of being read. The scribe points at the text and then gets out of the way.
Oversight stays human and local. Every authored year runs under a real congregation and a real elder. The method ends in a church, not in an app.
The testimony belongs to the one who lived it. She keeps copyright, publishes under her own name or a pen name or not at all, and can withdraw permission at any point, per edition and per channel.
Manuscripts are never training material. No testimony gets sold, licensed to a model developer, or fed into a public training corpus. Not at any price.
No dark patterns. No engagement traps, no manufactured urgency, nothing that profits from somebody staying stuck. She leaves the year more capable than she entered it or we have failed, whatever the revenue says.

Write those six into the structure and most of the theological risk simply evaporates, because the model was never carrying the weight. Tertius cannot corrupt Romans while Tertius is holding a pen.

VIIIThe field

The harvest moved and we did not follow

The centre of gravity of the Christian faith left the North Atlantic some time ago. Everybody in mission knows this and Western institutional spending has not caught up with it. YouVersion's engagement rose thirty-seven percent across Sub-Saharan Africa and twenty-two percent across Latin America in a single year. The flourishing study found the young struggling worldwide and religious practice associated with flourishing in nearly every culture measured. The hunger is global, the young are carrying most of it, and what helps them is practice rather than argument.

I grew up in Guyana, beside a river the colour of strong black tea, in a country the world's institutions have rarely thought to consult about anything. I founded newspapers in Georgetown and in Ontario, wrote a national column for fifteen years, went to Tyndale for a Master of Divinity when the questions I kept asking in print turned out to be theological ones, and have spent nineteen years building the platform I am describing here. I mention all of that for one reason only.

A method built in Colorado or Tennessee and shipped outward arrives in Georgetown or Lagos as a product, and gets received the way products are received, politely. A method built by a Guyanese man in Ontario who still writes in the rhythm of the Caribbean, who filed copy out of Georgetown for years and knows what a Sunday morning smells like there, arrives as a relative. I am not being sentimental about this. It is distribution, and it cannot be bought at any price by anybody who does not already have it.

The Qualped sky, the recurring visual signature of the Qualped platform — Qualped · Ontario, Canada · since 2007

Members are already writing from Guyana, Nigeria, Kenya, India and the Philippines, some of them in the language their grandmother prayed in. They are producing testimonies no mission board would have commissioned and no publisher would have acquired, at a printing cost near zero, travelling everywhere at once the moment they are finished.

That is the corridor. I am asking the Church to walk down it with me.

IXThe ask

What I am asking for

Nobody has to believe a forecast, and I would be suspicious of me if they did. The thing is built. It runs. It has produced books. What I want is for four kinds of leaders to test it against reality.

Broadcasters and publishers

You hold the reach. Six in ten American adults engage Christian media and half of them weekly. Give me one segment, one column or one imprint and I will turn a slice of your audience from people who consume your work into people who publish their own, with your name on every spine.

Platforms and AI builders

You hold the models and the ecosystem, and your own benchmarks have already told you where those models fail on doctrine. Give me an integration and I will show you an architecture in which that failure never reaches a believer, because the model was never seated where it could.

Denominations, seminaries and mission agencies

You hold the people and the oversight. Give me one cohort of a hundred, under your elders, on your terms, in any language you choose, and in twelve months I will hand your leadership a hundred published testimonies and an honest account of everything that went wrong on the way.

Capital and philanthropy

You hold the means. Fund the corridor and the first thousand of these come out of Georgetown, Lagos, Nairobi, Manila and Chennai rather than out of somebody's marketing department in the North Atlantic.

And I want it measured properly. A real university partnership, every cohort tracked at one year, three years and five, anonymised data open, findings submitted for peer review and published whatever they say. Willingness to be measured is about the only credential worth anything in a field this crowded with people making claims. I will sign that commitment before I ask anybody else to.

XLast thing

Where this ends

John saw the end of it, and what he described is the Jerusalem street again, grown to its full size.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne.

Revelation 7:9 · King James Version

Every tongue. The same word Luke used listing the Parthians and the Medes, carried all the way forward to the last page. Whatever else that vision means, it settles the direction of travel. The story starts with fifteen languages in one city and finishes with all of them in one room, and everything between those two scenes is our assignment.

We are further along it than we think. Five hundred and thirty-five languages left to begin, out of seven thousand four hundred. One new translation every three days. Six billion people holding a Bible they can actually read. A billion installs and rising, with the sharpest growth exactly where the Church is youngest and poorest and most alive.

And into that moment has walked a technology that speaks nearly all of it, answers anything, sleeps never, and believes nothing. It will shape the spiritual imagination of the next generation whether we participate or not. That work is going on tonight, in a thousand languages, in every time zone at once.

I would rather it were us. I might be wrong on plenty of the details and I expect correction from people who know more theology than I do, which is a great many people. I do not think I am wrong about the shape. The translators finished the book. Our generation has been handed the other half of Matthew's sentence, the part about a witness, and for the first time since that street in Jerusalem we have the means to put a living witness in front of every person on earth, in the language they were born into.

Publish the witnesses. Every tongue, every nation, in their own words, while there is still time to do it.

Shaun Michael Samaroo · Ontario, Canada