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You might not realize just how few resources there are for Deaf people, both for the gospel and in general. Many of us live in media-saturated cultures — can’t Deaf people with smartphones easily access captioned videos, books and other written resources?
But there’s much more to it than that.
Rob Myers with DOOR International tells us, “If your hearing went away right now, what you would envision is you would gather information through reading. But that’s not the experience that Deaf people have.”
Reading is a sound-based experience. For people born Deaf, reading is just a series of symbols and a very challenging second language to learn.
“When you think about Deaf ministry and trying to provide resources to Deaf people in general,” Myers says, “not only do you have to take away all the audio resources or sound-based resources, but you actually need to take away all of the written resources as well, because Deaf people for the majority of the globe don’t have full access to that information.”
That’s why DOOR is passionate about creating sign language resources for the Deaf.
“Sign language, which is a very different language in terms of grammar and structure, really is their first language,” Myers says.
Very few resources exist today in sign languages. As far as access to God’s Word, only one sign language out of the 375 globally has a full Bible video translation (American Sign Language).
“Just in terms of Scripture access, [we have] up to 75% of the sign languages that are out there globally that have no Scripture translation that has been happening at all,” Myers says.
“That’s a very different situation than we find ourselves here in America, where we have literally hundreds of different Bible translations and we can get access to any of those types of resources that we need.”
Pray for DOOR’s innovative Bible translation work and learn more about how you can partner with their work at doorinternational.org.
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This story originally appeared at Mission Network News and is republished here with permission.