Lausanne World Pulse – Partnering in Peru to Serve the Quechuas (Perupi qheswa runakunata servinapaqmi aynipi llank'ashanku)
By Irma Inugay Phelps
August 2011
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As the Quechua learn scripture in their own |
The end of the last century has brought many changes to the Quechuas. With the introduction of roads, modernity is coming in the form of clothing, utensils and foods. This creates more stress in families where the daily battle for mere subsistence is great. In many villages the presence of male adults diminishes during certain months of the year because men go to the larger towns to find manual jobs, mainly in construction.
Use of the Mother Tongue and Church Growth
While most Quechuas would say they are Catholic Christians, in reality they practice syncretism—a combination of Christian rituals with traditional Andean beliefs. For example, the annual festival of the patron saints may be the most important day in a village, yet it will often include making offerings to different spirits. During the last century the gospel has been preached in all the countries where Quechua people live. With much persistence of itinerant preachers, small groups of believers are gathering all over the Andes. Translations of the New Testament were started by missionary agencies for the different varieties of Quechua. Today there are four whole Bibles and some eighteen translations of the New Testament, ten of them done in Peru by SIL and Quechua translation teams.
A translation of the New Testament for the Cusco Quechua done by the Bible Society was published in 1947 and a complete Bible came out in 1988. In 2004 a revised version was published and presented. To date over fifty thousand Bibles have been sold in this language area.
One Quechua lady from a village in Ocongate was sitting on a bench of Cusco’s main square. When I greeted her in Quechua she felt comfortable engaging in a conversation about the upcoming national elections. She said, “Most people in my community are going to vote for pastor H…There are only three families in my community that are not evangelical Christians.” Then she named more than a dozen villages in her area where the majority of the people attend church regularly.
In the last twenty years, Christian evangelical churches have experienced growth in this area of Peru. Today if you visit a Quechua church service, you will enjoy hearing worship, announcements, greetings, preaching and prayers in the vernacular language. However, the Bible reading is done in Spanish. Why is this the case?
Clemente and Florentino grew up in the village of Occoruro. As children they were overjoyed when a school started in their village because they did not have to walk for two hours as their oldest brother Eleuterio did to go to the nearest school. Their brother’s report of how town children mistreated him for speaking Quechua made the two afraid of Eleuterio’s school. However, even at Occoruro, the teacher had a negative attitude toward the use of Quechua. At home the father, trying to help his children learn Spanish, had forbidden the use of Quechua. Since their grandmother only knew a few words in Spanish, she could not speak much to her grandchildren, which made her feel sad and inferior.
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Irma Inugay Phelps has Peruvian and Japanese roots. She was trained as a grade school teacher. Since joining Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1971 she has been involved in Bible translation and literacy work with Quechuas in different areas of Peru. |