Greg Pruett
10 min read ⭑
“Watching the news, you may have convinced yourself that we live in dark times. But just out of sight of our media, this may be God’s finest hour.”
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
The most meaningful meal I’ve ever eaten was in a village in West Africa among a people who were 99.9% followers of the Quran. One night, we collected a team of a dozen or so Christians, piled into our Landcruiser, and took off across the bush to show The Jesus Film at a distant village.
At the end of the night, we were so hungry and thirsty! One local man provided us with a vast bowl of rice covered with delicious oily peanut sauce. All of us passed around a huge plastic cup of water and ate from the same massive bowl with our hands, laughing and joking in the dark under a starry sky.
Years later, an old pastor asked me, “Do you know what that meal meant to me?”
I shook my head.
He said, “When I was young, I worked as a houseboy at the Bible school. I visited another houseboy at one of the missionaries’ houses, and while there, I used a spoon to eat my lunch and the missionary saw me. Later I found that spoon in a pot of water. She had cut up a bar of lye soap onto it and was boiling it thoroughly. That’s when I knew that the missionaries think I’m dirty. But that night, we ate from the same bowl. You drank after me from the same cup. Now I know that the missionaries don’t think I’m dirty anymore.”
The meal was more impactful than the preaching.
Damian Patkowski; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?
Seventeen years ago, I left West Africa and started serving as the CEO of Pioneer Bible Translators. Everyone told me CEOs burn out without a hobby. The only hobby I had ever had was warthog hunting back in the village. I used to love walking out in the bush with a .22 rifle over one shoulder and a .30-06 rifle over the other shoulder. Usually, it was just a heavily armed walk through the woods, but I loved it. I saw God’s creation in powerful ways.
One morning after the first rains, the earth had opened up and fountains of termites were soaring up into the sky, wings glinting in the sun. All up and down the column of termites sailed a colorful flock of birds snatching the bugs. Something about that experience really refilled the tank of my soul.
When I got to Dallas for my new job, I found myself staring out the window. So I got an athletic dog and picked up running as my hobby instead.
Getting outside helps me reset my thinking. After all, we tend to surround ourselves with man-made things. We pass our time invested in social media. People create a virtual universe that competes in our lives with the one God made.
So every morning I go outside, look at the sunrise, and internalize one crucial truth: I am not God. I do not make reality. I live inside it. I worship a God who made it. He does not bend to my designs or to anything virtual. I must bend to his.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?
If I had to publicly admit to a weakness, I confess that I struggle with stress management. My job as CEO brings with it the strain of travel combined with an ongoing barrage of emails requesting dicey judgment calls added to an overlay of family commitments to spice things up. Huge stressors war in my mind and try to rob me of God’s peace in my life.
I hide the stress. And I’ve learned deep-breathing exercises designed to help me not wig out in the middle of a stressful confrontation.
But when I return from travel or finish a complex event, I find myself trying to medicate my stress overload. I struggle to defuse the situation in a healthy way. And I overeat.
Unfortunately, I have a metabolism that could power a nuclear plant with nothing more than the energy found in a single serving of chips and salsa. I can work for six months to slowly chip away at my weight, running over 20 miles a week. Yet I can easily gain five pounds with one evening of eating out.
So I try to work on being content. I get home and reflect on how happy I am with my house, my kids, my wife, my everything. I have no need to medicate any dissatisfaction or stress with food or anything else. I can simply sit down and relax and wait for the stress to melt away. Ah, but chips and queso would go so great with that, wouldn’t it?
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?
We live in a historic moment. Decades ago when people said, “Hey, everyone should have the Bible in their language!” they had no idea there were over 7,300 languages in the world. Back when I returned from West Africa and began leading Pioneer Bible, we didn’t know if getting people Scripture in their language was a 100-year job or a 1,000-year one.
Now, we’ve all done the math, and it shows we will start the last language projects needed by 2035, and that every language on earth could have at least the New Testament by 2050. Thankfully, 11 of the most dynamic Bible translation agencies have united in an alliance called illumiNations to accelerate the trend so we can get the New Testament translated for 99.96% of the world in the next 10 years.
But how? That’s where my second passion comes in. Instead of praying about our strategies, we’ve learned that prayer is the strategy. I’ve written a book called Extreme Prayer on that topic. In that book, I assumed people knew how to hear from God. After years of people asking me the same spiritual questions, I wrote a second book called Extraordinary Hearing to try to help people know how to draw near enough to God to hear him whisper.
So my passions boil down to translating the Bible, leading, and writing books about prayer.
You could get involved! For $35, you can get a verse translated. Or you can open up the illumiNations website and start praying.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
When I first became a missionary, I didn’t really invest much in prayer. But that changed during my first year living in remote West Africa. I remember the moment the struggle became too great for my wife and me. We actually decided not only to leave the mission field but also to get a divorce when we got home. But the airport was more than an 8-hour drive away across rugged terrain. Being that far from the airport may have saved our marriage.
We decided instead to get away to the mountains and pray for a week. Instead of quitting, instead of divorcing, we turned to God at that pivotal moment. Sadly, our baby got the mumps. Rebecca fell ill all week. I spent all my time caring for my sick family. We had no restful respite. But on the way home, we drove the whole five hours praying. Satan could fill the week with illness, but God redeemed it on the drive home. We poured out our souls on that journey. We recommitted our lives and gave ourselves to God. And Satan lost a huge battle right there during that car trip.
Somehow, God accepted that living sacrifice, and everything started to go better. The baby started sleeping at night. Our marriage recovered. The language learning worked out.
God respected the tenacity of a couple deciding to pray. In our desperation, we turned to God. It was the most important lesson. I’ve learned that prayer really is the strategy.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it—which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?
I don’t find that spiritual disciplines meet my needs these days. Instead, I’m developing spiritual habits. Under stress, we don’t rise to the level of our disciplines; we fall to the level of our habits. So I have a chair with a little table next to it. On that table, I keep my Bible, my reading glasses, my prayer list, and whatever else I need. Each morning when I wake up, I know I’m on my way to that chair. Good habits can be as hard to break as bad habits.
The Word of God is alive. So for inspiration, I’ve left behind devotional books in favor of meditation on the Scriptures themselves. For a while, I was listening through the whole Bible in a year. But the voluminous exposure approach wasn’t working well for me.
So now, I read just a chapter or two of the Bible, but I focus on finding something in it to obey during the day. And I also interact with God on the topic of the Scripture.
Jesus said he would knock on the door and wait for someone to hear. Every morning, I think about opening that door and reading Scripture in the presence of my Lord, talking with him about what I read. Listening for him to direct me by giving me marching orders. I have a prayer tool I created called the PROACTIVE Prayer Template. I try to structure my intercessory prayers using that tool.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources—lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are three resources that have impacted you?
I read a lot of books, but I don’t come across many game-changers.
However, there are several Max Lucado books that I still think about. Max has a way of making Jesus come to life for me. No Wonder They Call Him the Savior was Max’s second book and the one that really kicked off his career. It’s worth going back in time that far to recapture the wonder of the cross.
The most helpful books I’ve read are about leadership because that’s where my real daily problems lie. Most people have heard about the idea of servant leadership, but they’ve never gone back and read the book by that name written in the 1970s by Robert Greenleaf. There’s a reason the idea caught on. Just listen to the title: Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Could there be a topic any more relevant to our times?
Also formative and foundational for leaders everywhere is the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. If you don’t read that book, you won’t be able to understand leaders when they talk.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season—and tell us what it’s done for you.
At this point in my life, providing Scripture to the Deaf has become a major investment for me. We’ve learned that there are nearly 400 sign languages used by 70 million Deaf people worldwide. At Pioneer Bible Translators, we’ve immersed ourselves in the world of the Deaf. We have 16 Deaf employees, and we’re currently trying to learn American Sign Language throughout our organization.
Consequently, the best free resource I know to help the reader learn ASL is lifeprint.com. You might’ve noticed that Deaf people are emerging at a time in which hearing people are beginning to pay more attention to their situation. I recommend learning about Deaf culture and understanding how they view themselves—not as people with disabilities but as a community with a culture and a language.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
Watching the news, you may have convinced yourself that we live in dark times. But just out of sight of our media, this may be God’s finest hour. Over the next two decades, milestones will be crossed. We have the opportunity to see the day in which networks of churches will use translated Scriptures in every language community on Earth. If you don’t let that happen during your lifetime, you’ll completely miss out on being a part of it.
You can go to pioneerbible.org and find out how to get involved more personally in accomplishing these great milestones in Great Commission history.
As for me, I plan to keep finding ways to cross language barriers for the first time with the Word of God. Even though we’ve made a lot of progress, there are still whole cultures out there that have never heard of Jesus and don’t have the Bible in their language. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Now, the extremely difficult places are left—places where we’re not welcome to enter the way we always have.
Within that endeavor, there’s an opportunity for many people who are reading this article. The main way for people to get involved used to be by giving money. But now, we’re looking for business leaders who can join our team. And agricultural experts. And teachers. Really, most skilled people could contact us through our website and find a way to participate directly. Don’t miss out on this great movement of God’s Spirit!
Turn on the news for just a few minutes, and you’ll start feeling like this world of ours is falling apart. And to an extent, it is. But what the news often won’t tell you is that God is working every day—healing and restoring, rescuing and redeeming, saving souls and spreading his Word. Can you see him moving in your own life, too?
“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working’” (John 5:17, NIV).
Greg Pruett has been president of Pioneer Bible Translators since 2007. Before that, Greg—along with his wife, Rebecca, and their three children—lived in West Africa for more than 12 years, where they helped complete a translation of the entire Bible into the Yalunka language. Greg has a degree in civil engineering from Texas A&M as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary. Greg has written two books published by Tyndale: Extreme Prayer and Extraordinary Hearing.
