Dozens of bare-chested men in leafy sashes and wreaths dance in formation down the road in Lossu 1, a village in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. They wave colorful leaves in time to their song and make their way toward the village church. Women follow in traditional, brightly colored meri blouses with fresh leaves tied around their foreheads. Other villagers walk behind them, their cellphones held high to capture video of the historic Notsi New Testament dedication. It’s June 25, 2025—114 years since the gospel first came to the Notsi (pronounced NO-chee) ethnic group.
“What did you come here for?” a young man asks in Notsi to the parade leaders.
“We come to give you the Good News,” Bible translators Kevin and Gertrude Nicholas reply as church leaders carry a wooden ark holding a newly printed Notsi New Testament with a red cover embossed with the words Inesaait Mamainaang Laa Sin Notsi—The Good News Going to the Notsi.
This celebration has been a long time coming, with a Bible translation effort that began 39 years ago. The Notsi people, who today number 3,800 and are 90 percent Christian, were initially ambivalent about the project. Yet by the time the New Testament was completed last year, local translators and many parishioners not only had a deeper understanding of God and his Word, but they also recognized that God cared enough about them to put his Word into their words.
Davis Powell, president and CEO of the Bible translation group Seed Company, which helped with the New Testament translation, said his team members frequently hear the recipients of a new translation say, “We now know that God is not a foreign God that speaks another language. God is a God that knows us and speaks our language,” he said. “We don’t have to learn another language to get to God. But he sees us, he knows us, and we can pray in the language that our mother spoke to us since birth and have a relationship with him.”
Fijian Methodist missionaries first came to Papua New Guinea’s Island Region (northeast of New Guinea Island) in 1875. Papua New Guinea is one of the world’s most linguistically diverse nations, with 838 spoken languages. So when the missionaries introduced the gospel to Notsi speakers in the village of Libba in 1911, they dealt with the overwhelming diversity of languages by using an island-wide church lingua franca—in this case, Kuanua from nearby New Britain Island. It simplified and streamlined the process of training church leaders from many tribes and languages in New Ireland province and meant missionaries only had to learn one language to minister to many tribes.
Sometimes tribes would adopt the church language as their own. For others, like the Notsi, the language was only used in portions of the church service, which meant many Notsi couldn’t understand the preaching, Bible readings, or songs, even as they professed faith in God.
“Today, they could sing all four verses of a Kuanua hymn, but not understand what they’re singing,” Gertrude Nicholas said. Even now, only a few Notsi people speak Kuanua. During the week, they speak their mother tongue of Notsi. Many also speak Tok Pisin and some English, Papua New Guinea’s national languages.
Although Tok Pisin Bibles are common in the country, the English-based Creole language is “handicapped,” explained Wycliffe’s former regional director Holly Hong. “There aren’t many vocabulary words. It has to keep borrowing from English and has a very simplified preposition system.” Even if Tok Pisin had been used more widely in Notsi church services, its simplified grammar and vocabulary limit in-depth communication about faith and Scripture.
Despite such limitations, in the 1980s, the three Notsi speakers who would later help translate the Bible into their mother tongue became Christians. Wesley Kurang and Shirley Taupis came to know Christ through revival-like conventions, and Lynette Topaipo became a Christian through a Bible study.
In 1986, Wycliffe Bible translators Lee and Laurinda Erickson came to New Ireland, where they learned Notsi, analyzed its sound patterns and grammar, and developed an orthography, or written language. (In the 1920s, an American anthropologist had developed a Roman alphabet–based spelling system for Notsi, but it was incomplete and inconsistent.)
Yet Notsi villagers considered a Bible translation project to be pointless.
“A lot of times they think, Oh, yeah, we can hear the gospel in Tok Pisin or English, but they don’t understand it in-depth, and they might be understanding it wrong because not too many people understand English or Tok Pisin,” Kurang, one of the Notsi translators, said in Tok Pisin. At the time, Kurang also doubted the necessity of a Notsi Bible translation.
Before leaving the island for health reasons, the Ericksons translated the Gospel of Mark. It took eight years. Gertrude Nicholas, who later took up the Bible translation project, said local disagreements over vocabulary exacerbated the slow pace of translation. Notsi people who left the village for formal education or work often lost their own language’s depth of meaning in favor of using more Tok Pisin or English, creating tension with the Notsi speakers who never left, she said.
Around the time the Ericksons left Papua New Guinea (PNG), Wycliffe was evaluating its data. “They were looking at how many missionaries were being recruited annually and how many languages were still awaiting their first verse of Scripture,” Powell said.
Wycliffe determined that it would be the year 2150 before Bible translation could even begin for the thousands of languages yet to be engaged, a term the group uses to signify having a Bible translation program in progress. For example, as of March, only 233 of PNG’s 838 language groups have New Testaments, and 15 have complete Bibles. To reach more languages sooner, translators needed a different strategy.
Former Wycliffe president and CEO Bernie May developed a model to identify indigenous leaders who could translate for their people. It would effectively multiply the number of local translators available. The Seed Company, born as Partners with Nationals in 1993, immediately began working with 10 language groups. It coordinated technical, funding, translation, and management partners, with Wycliffe and SIL often among those partners.
In 1996, SIL translators Joe and Jill McCarthy arrived in New Ireland and invited five Notsi speakers, including Taupis, to establish an approved orthography and translate the New Testament.
Still, many villagers said a Notsi translation was unnecessary when they had English and Tok Pisin versions of the Bible. Many groups, Powell said, have been told their whole lives that their language isn’t a real language because it isn’t widely recognized and that their culture isn’t important.
Taupis came to believe otherwise and said the translation work changed her life. “The time I came to work in the translation, the time I translated it into my language, it truly touched my [heart],” she said. She added that not only has her understanding of God’s Word grown—she can now clearly articulate her faith.
But from the beginning, her husband didn’t believe the project was necessary and never supported her work. Fifteen years ago, after Taupis spent a month away working on the translation project, she came home to an empty house. Her husband had left her.
When she translated Philippians 4:13—“I can do all this through him who gives me strength,” or “Amuina iaa pupua ngali xosaraa no mat maarang araraa sin Karisito iwaa tii awatwati iaa”—she said it gave her courage and hope to persevere in the translation work, especially when she had doubts about her ability.
In 2007, the Seed Company provided funding for the creation of the New Ireland Translation Institute (NITI) in Sohun, where translators from around the island receive training and focus on translation work. Since NITI opened, they have produced five published New Testaments on the island, including the Notsi version. In 2025, Seed Company engaged its 2,500th global language.
That progress means more than numbers to Powell. “I’m hard-pressed to understand how someone can become a disciple of Christ without Scripture in their language,” he said.
Kurang’s original doubts about the need for the Bible in his heart language dissolved when he realized the Wycliffe translators must have a reason why they wanted to translate God’s words into his mother tongue. In 2007, he joined the translation team and began to see how the Scripture in his own language had the power and strength to touch his life in a way that other languages couldn’t. “I began to pray in Notsi because I saw the value, the impact, [and] the power of the vernacular words that were touching me.”
In 2009, Gertrude Nicholas and her husband, Kevin, arrived in Lossu to continue the Notsi translation work for SIL. She had earlier worked as a literacy coordinator in New Ireland for 17 language groups, including the Notsi. This experience helped ease villagers’ hesitancy to embrace yet another set of missionaries. While Gertrude Nicholas worked as a literacy consultant at NITI, Kevin Nicholas was a translation adviser, translating two or three chapters of Scripture a day with the team. At times, work would slow when they reached a difficult chapter.
For example, Kevin thought 1 Corinthians would be a difficult book to translate, but the team breezed through it—until they got to chapter 8, where Paul talks about food sacrificed to idols.
“They didn’t have much teaching on that passage,” Kevin said, “and so we had to really dig into it to get to understand the meaning.”
Kurang said words came to mind that he didn’t know well but were precisely the right words for the verses they were working on that day. “It’s a special thing that happened to me, that God actually revealed the special meanings of the words that are very important to the translation work,” he said.
Kurang’s family was supportive of his work. If he was sick, his daughter Lydia filled in for him on the team. His wife writes hymns and choruses in the Notsi language, two of which are in a new hymn book produced by SIL.
In 2012, Topaipo joined Taupis and Kurang in the translation work. They spent weeks at a time at NITI learning how to translate Scripture into their own language. They used computers to record their progress. Back home in Lossu, they worked individually with notebooks and ballpoint pens.
Despite the personal difficulties during her time on the team, Taupis thanks God for the translation work, especially the ability to read and write in Notsi. “Before, my language was just talking to people orally. But now I can see that my language has so much value that we even have to worry about the spelling, like in English, and we have to write it correctly.”
After the translation team completed the New Testament and tested it in the village, Wycliffe printed and sold 300 copies of the Notsi New Testament to villagers at a reduced cost—about half a day’s wages.
Notsi speakers now get to understand sermons, sing, and pray in their own language. Kurang said people now pray in Notsi, which tells him people are reading the translation at home. Along with study guides for church leaders and a Notsi hymnal, SIL has also published a New Testament audiobook. And although the Notsi Roman Catholic churches use Tok Pisin in liturgy and teaching, they also bought copies of the Notsi New Testament.
In Lossu, a bell draws villagers to church on Sunday morning. By the time the bell rings a third time, most of the 500 or so villagers are walking to the tidy grounds of the cinderblock church with its thatched roof. The service is supposed to start at 9 a.m., but, Kevin Nicholas noted, it actually starts whenever it starts and ends after hours of preaching, explanations of the sermon, hymns, and prayer. After four decades of work and more than 100 years of waiting, worship in the Notsi language now pours out of the open windows to villagers on the veranda.
The three Notsi translators haven’t yet found anyone else locally to add to their team, but they continue their work translating the Old Testament. They have a draft of Genesis and plan to start on Psalms next. Meanwhile, in Texas, Gertrude Nicholas continues her Notsi work, paraphrasing biblical stories and developing Sunday school lessons for children. She has drafts of stories from 11 Old Testament books and Acts, which Taupis and her brother will edit for her.
When the Nicholases return to Lossu in August to dedicate the Notsi-dubbed Jesus Film, they’ll bring SD cards for sale loaded with the video, the Notsi New Testament on the Scripture app, and recordings of Notsi songs.
Kurang’s experience resolved any skepticism he had about how useful a Notsi translation of Scripture would be.
“Bringing the Notsi language to God’s Word helped me understand God’s Word very, very clearly,” Kurang said. “That’s why this language, my language, is very important … to understand lots of things: not only God’s Word, but to understand in-depth God’s Word.”
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