Southeast Asia · August 24 – September 4, 2026
OBT Consultant-in-Training Workshop, Psalms

The teams were a long way from home. Musicians and translators had travelled in from across the region for two weeks, and the psalms they were making were for communities none of the consultants in the room had ever visited.

A translation has to be checked by the people it is for. Traditionally that means going back: months later, in the village, with a recording and a list of questions. The workshop did not have months. It had a phone.

So the drafts went out over WhatsApp while the workshop was still running. A team would internalize Psalm 13, compose, record a version, and send it home, and the answers came back from the community within days, in time to change the song.

What came back was not only correction. The feedback reported that the songs were reaching people, landing in the heart rather than merely being understood. One team’s lament in their own language, sent from a workshop hundreds of miles away, was already doing what a lament does.

It is a small logistical detail in a report full of them, and it quietly changes the shape of this kind of work. The distance between a psalm being drafted and a community weighing in on it used to be measured in months and airfare. Here it was measured in hours, and the community’s voice made it into the version that was recorded.