EMDC 2026
Bringing the Psalms to Life as Song

Overview

A New Kind of Workshop

The EMDC 2026 workshop — formally titled Psalms Alive!: Bringing the Psalms to Life as you Translate Them Into Song — was Scriptura's first workshop designed not for a single translation team, but for a diverse international cohort of practitioners. Held over four days at the annual EMDC gathering, the workshop brought together Bible translators, Oral Bible Translation practitioners, ethnomusicologists, artists, and Scripture engagement workers from across Asia and the Pacific.

Where previous Scriptura workshops focused on equipping specific communities to translate specific psalms, this event had a different goal: to equip people to go home and run these workshops themselves. Every session was designed so that participants experienced the process as participants first, then learned how to prepare and lead it for others.

Workshop Proceedings

Four Days of Learning and Practice

The workshop followed a deliberate "see it, learn it, do it" progression. Each day built on the last, moving participants from experience to understanding to independent practice.

What Participants Created

A Song Is Born

Among the most tangible outcomes of the workshop was a new psalm-song created during the sessions themselves: a setting of Psalm 100 in Melayu Alor, the Malay dialect spoken in the Alor region of eastern Indonesia.

Titled Bawa Persembahan Sukur — "Bring an Offering of Thanks" — the song was composed using the local Seki musical genre from the Alor region. It follows Psalm 100 faithfully, rendering each movement in a form suited to congregational singing.

The creation of this song during the workshop itself illustrates the speed and quality of output that becomes possible when participants are properly equipped. The team came with exegetical preparation, a local musical genre in mind, and the internalization methodology to guide them — and within the workshop days had a complete, notated, singable psalm-song in their own language.

Participant Voices

In Their Own Words

The written feedback was extensive and largely unreserved. Several themes emerged consistently.

On the Internalization Experience

On Scriptura's Resources

On What They Will Take Home

A Veteran's Testimony

Not all the most significant feedback appeared on the written form. After the formal sessions, a long-time ethnomusicologist with decades of experience shared that he had used Lectio Divina for years as his personal method for creating songs from Scripture — and that after experiencing Scriptura's internalization process, he will use the internalization method instead from now on.

When someone with that depth of experience chooses to replace a practice that already worked, it speaks to something fundamental in what the methodology offers.

Impact

Making It Their Own

One of the clearest measures of a workshop's success is not what participants say in the room, but what they do when they go home. The feedback from EMDC 2026 shows that participants left not with a borrowed method but with a methodology they had already begun to claim as their own — adapted to specific communities, specific psalms, and specific goals.

Key Findings

What We Learned

In addition to gathering participant feedback, the workshop surfaced a set of findings about how Scriptura's methodology works in practice across diverse international contexts.

Internalization Works Across Cultures

Participants from widely different backgrounds — translation scholars, oral storytellers, visual artists, community musicians — all responded meaningfully to the internalization process. The methodology proved adaptable to different learning styles and cultural contexts without losing its core integrity.

Experience Before Instruction

The decision to begin the workshop with an experience of internalization (Day One, Psalm 133) rather than a lecture about internalization was consistently cited as one of the most impactful design choices. Participants who had felt the process in their own bodies were far better prepared to understand and teach it.

The Multicultural Setting: Asset and Challenge

The international cohort enriched discussions and cross-cultural exchange significantly. For the song-creation exercises, participants sometimes found it more effective to work individually or in language-matched pairs — a finding that will shape future workshop design.

Clarity of Structure Matters

Several participants noted they would have benefited from a clearer overview of the pedagogical arc at the start — knowing not just what was happening each day, but why the workshop was designed the way it was.

What We Are Improving

For the Next Workshop

Scriptura is committed to honest evaluation. The EMDC 2026 feedback gave the team specific, actionable guidance for future iterations.

• 1
  Clearer workshop orientation. Provide a pedagogical overview at the outset so participants understand not just the agenda but the logic behind the design — why Day One begins with experience rather than instruction, and how each session builds toward independent facilitation.
• 2
  Video facilitation resources. Several participants requested video demonstrations of what an internalization session looks like in practice. This is a priority for the coming year — particularly for oral-context practitioners where video will reach further than written guides.
• 3
  A searchable Psalm index. Two participants independently identified the same gap: no easy way to find psalms by theme, emotion, or kingdom goal. A searchable index organized by categories such as comfort, unity, gratitude, and lament is under development.
• 4
  Language-grouped song creation. For the creative exercises, offering participants the option to work in mother-tongue groups will allow fuller expression and more authentic output — especially in the song-composition phase.
• 5
  Culturally relative beauty. The workshop's teaching on beauty needs to invite participants to define beauty from within their own tradition, rather than implying an external aesthetic standard. This is a genuine theological and pedagogical refinement.