The leader of a Muslim community asked Sitara* if she would translate a children’s Bible into his language. This surprised Sitara.
“Imagine the Muslim leader,” she said, recalling the moment, which was not long after she met him.
Sitara works among a minority people group in Pakistan. To protect both her work and the people group, they will not be named. Nor will their language be referenced. After years of language learning and ministry, Sitara was passively kicked out of the country.
At that point, she asked God what was next. “I feel my calling to the people is not finished,” Sitara said.
With one contact in hand, Sitara travelled to another country with a large population of this people group to see if she could continue her work.
She visited that contact and her father during a vision trip, and it happened that the father was the leader of the community in this country.
“I greeted him in his language, and then I learned that I had lived for three years with his relatives and didn’t know it,” Sitara said. “From that point, I was family for him.”
He invited her over again once she moved to the country and during one of the visits, he asked about the children’s Bible. Sitara did not promise him anything but invited him to show her the book.
What he brought her was a children’s Bible published by Watchtower Press, the publisher for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sitara did not want to quench the initiative – she wanted the Bible in the language of this group. But she did not want to translate this particular Bible.
“You deserve something more authentic,” she told him. With his permission, she began translating a set of Bible stories into the language of the people.
“So we followed their choice of story set and did that for two years,” Sitara said.
After that, she asked the translator about translating the whole Bible. He wanted to talk with the community leader before moving ahead. The pair asked the leader for permission, the leader withdrew his support of the project, but said the translator was allowed to continue if he wanted and that is how Bible translation began for this language in 2017.
God Calls Sitara
Sitara, who is originally from Europe, felt called to go to this people group after two dreams. The first was when she was 11 and not yet a believer. Sitara gave her life to Jesus at age 18. When she was 34, God gave her another dream. In the dream, she saw a computer screen and heard a voice say, “Go to the country I’ll show you.”
“I thought, when God speaks twice, He can speak three times so I will wait and I will pray and then we’ll see,” she said.
She saw a leaflet about this minority people group and joined a team working among the people group in Pakistan. After seven years of working in country, her visa was not renewed, and that’s when she moved and eventually began the Bible translation project.
Translating Bible Stories for Oral Cultures
“In our translation team, everyone is Muslim, but they are happy to translate the Bible,” Sitara said, adding that they work to get the meaning of the text accurate because it is a holy text, “and they see their own responsibility in that.”
Until recently, all her work has been done in partnership with Muslims because Islam is the religion of this people group. Joshua Project reports that 0% of the population are evangelical believers.
Sitara, on the other hand, said she knows of about 10 people who are secret believers. Right now, it is better for them to keep their faith private, she said.
“She walks a tightrope, maintains the relationship and gets Bible materials in non-print form into [the language of] this people group,” said Andrew Haas, adaptation coordinator for TWR MOTION.
MOTION is a ministry of TWR that creates animated Bible story videos for people groups with limited access to biblical content. The team believes that people of all cultures deserve to hear about Jesus in a way they understand. That’s why the team partners with church planters and local believers to ensure the videos will speak to the people and culture, sharing the truth of the Gospel.
Haas worked with Sitara to adapt MOTION‘s animated Bible story series, Share the Story, into the language of this people group. Haas calls workers like Sitara the heroes of the final frontier of missions.
“God’s Word doesn’t return void,” Haas said, “and this is going to be an incredible tipping point for the culture to have the truth of Jesus available in a way they can repeat, they can mediate on, they can share with their friends.”
Like many cultures in the world, this people group is an oral culture. That does not mean the people are not literate. It means they pass down their culture through spoken word.
“[This people group] responds so much better to audio,” Sitara said. “Audio really sticks to their hearts, whereas written they would perceive it more as work than as personal.”
That’s why, although Sitara is writing down the Bible stories as part of the translation process, the stories will be in audio. She is also working with teams like MOTION and JESUS Film to get Bible stories in the language in video and audio form. Oral cultures use stories, poems, dances and rituals to remember things, Haas said.
“We all start oral learning,” he said, “but those patterns are taken away in a literate culture and replaced with new skills.”
One of the translators Sitara works with did not understand why she wanted to translate the Bible and other content into their language because they understand Urdu and English.
“Now he understands why, because it speaks to his heart,” she said. It’s different for a person to experience the truth of God’s Word in their own language.
Adapting Share the Story
Sitara and her team run a language website, evangelistic website, a YouTube channel and Facebook page. These are the platforms where she shares the Bible stories. Sitara received Share the Story in the language of the people group in December 2024.
“They were meticulous as they translated the animated Bible story scripts”, Haas said. He worked with her over two and half years to translate and test the stories with the people group.
Share the Story is a 20-episode series. The stories, artwork and music were chosen to connect Muslim audiences with the story of Jesus’ sacrifice and redemption, starting in the Genesis account of creation and ending with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
It was originally created for a people group in North Africa and has since been translated into 19 languages with 15 more in progress. Part of why MOTION uses animation to tell Bible stories is because it is easier to adapt into other languages by replacing the narrator.
Part of adapting the series into a new language involves testing the stories with the people group once the translation is complete. “What is sticking when they hear the stories? Are there any misconceptions?” Haas said. “That tells us how decent of a job we did at communicating [the story] in the script.”
It can be a rewarding process. One of the translators Sitara worked with said he learned a lot and understood the biblical message more after translating the scripts. This encouraged Sitara as this man is easily moved.
“That this seemingly stone heart, which is so consequentially Muslim, is touched is a really good thing,” she said.
Considering Jesus
Since Sitara received the final videos in December 2024, she is using them in a variety of ways, including running ads on Facebook and showing them in small group settings. Part of Sitara’s approach is to encourage natural friend groups or families to gather and learn about the stories together. If groups come to faith together, they are more likely to withstand persecution.
A discovery group of about five people gathers every three weeks to watch two episodes and discuss what the stories mean. The leader is not a believer nor are any of the participants, but they are open to watching the videos.
Since the group began meeting in December, they started by watching episodes 12 and 13 of Share the Story. These two videos focus on the birth of Jesus and how the news of his birth spread to the shepherds and wise men. This group of Muslims was surprised people started to believe in Jesus while he was a baby.
“They found it remarkable that people started to believe in Jesus also even though he was just a child,” said Sitara, who sends the videos and questions each time. “And that the priests didn’t go back to the king because they started to believe in Jesus. And then also that angels came down to the shepherds to tell them about Jesus and they started to believe in Jesus, too. So they found this remarkable that all these people started to believe in Jesus.”
The team does not receive too many responses when they run ads or share content online. It takes time to build trust.
As the team uses Share the Story to run ads, the goal is to encourage people to message the response team, but it’s challenging because they do not know who is on the other side of the screen.
“There is mistrust toward people they don’t know because there is so much distrust in society and it’s risky to talk about such things [religious topics] with a person they don’t know,” Sitara said.
Sitara remains hopeful. “It’s not all negative even if they don’t answer,” she said, adding that people are watching. Viewership is up on their YouTube page, and visits have increased to their website. “It’s just we don’t know exactly what happens on the other end.”
Since Sitara is seeing openness and curiosity at in-person gatherings, she sees that as representative of what is happening when people engage with the content online. Although the impact may be reduced because there is no explanation alongside it, she said. That’s why getting people in messaging conversations is the goal.
“But still it will do its work, and it will have an impact in their hearts,” Sitara said.
*This is a pseudonym.
