Thanks to her excellent training, her Baatonu translation team went on to bring the Old Testament to completion in the early 1990s. In short, throughout 38 years, Jean led the team that gave the Baatonu people the Word of God. What an eternal honour!
Today, there are over 150 churches and smaller annexes amongst a tribe of which well over 75% of the men call themselves Muslim. This amazing church growth in a Muslim region would have been impossible without the Baatonu Bible. Her ‘text’ has been the principal translation used to train some 75 Baatonu pastors, some of whom have preceded her to heaven. Since 1978, it is and will remain the best-selling Baatonu text in the land. Even the Catholics in Benin say to me that they greatly prefer Jean Soutar’s Bible over an alternate translation attempted by a Baatonu priest. Her work is truly excellent.
I’ve always told my colleagues that Jean Soutar deserved an honourary doctorate for her labours. But she has a better honour coming. Can you picture and hear the applause when Jean kneels in the presence of her Lord, Master and Saviour? Truly of her it may well be said, ‘Well done good and faithful servant. You gave them my Word!’
We salute the home-going of a great, godly, Scottish-Canadian, missionary pioneer
The labours of Jean Soutar (1922-2014) in northern Benin will have the longest impact of all the SIM pioneer missionaries working among the Baatonu people. She gave them the Bible in their mother tongue. Inheriting the earlier fruit of, first, the McDougalls, then American linguist Dr William Welmers, and then Rosella Entz, Jean joined SIM’s team and fully grasped the Baatonu language, script and grammar. In fact, her master-level linguistic-lexical-grammatical research was so excellent that it became the official basis of the language when it was adopted by the then ‘Revolutionary’ Beninese government and UNICEF in the late 1970s. You have to be good for communists and the UN to endorse your work. Thanks to her excellent training, her Baatonu translation team went on to bring the Old Testament to completion in the early 1990s. In short, throughout 38 years, Jean led the team that gave the Baatonu people the Word of God. What an eternal honour! Today, there are over 150 churches and smaller annexes amongst a tribe of which well over 75% of the men call themselves Muslim. This amazing church growth in a Muslim region would have been impossible without the Baatonu Bible. Her ‘text’ has been the principal translation used to train some 75 Baatonu pastors, some of whom have preceded her to heaven. Since 1978, it is and will remain the best-selling Baatonu text in the land. Even the Catholics in Benin say to me that they greatly prefer Jean Soutar’s Bible over an alternate translation attempted by a Baatonu priest. Her work is truly excellent. I’ve always told my colleagues that Jean Soutar deserved an honourary doctorate for her labours. But she has a better honour coming. Can you picture and hear the applause when Jean kneels in the presence of her Lord, Master and Saviour? Truly of her it may well be said, ‘Well done good and faithful servant. You gave them my Word!’ We salute the home-going of a great, godly, Scottish-Canadian, missionary pioneer. |