Asho Chin New Testament & Literacy

• Location: Myanmar
• New Testament Target Completion Date: 2033

Part of the Chin race of Myanmar and India, the Asho Chin people account for their various clans that inhabit a range of hills by relating their own story of the Tower of Babel and the Flood. Asho Chin speakers reside in Myanmar in the Yangon Division, Magway Division, Rakhine State, and Mindon Township areas. The population of 184,000 speaks two dialects, Plains Asho and Hill Asho. While 60% of the Asho Chin follow Buddhism, 25% adhere to ethnic religions. Another 25% profess Christianity, 10% of whom claim to be evangelical.

American Baptist missionaries brought the message of the gospel to the Asho Chin in 1887. After more than a decade, that ministry produced about 100 believers. Their numbers continued to increase, and today the Asho Chin believers have established five Baptist church associations. In 2008, the Plains Asho received a Bible in their dialect and script. However, the Hill Asho cannot read this translation because they still use the Burmese script and never learned the new script.

A teacher attending Bible college in Yangon noticed individuals from several other language groups reading, writing, singing, studying, and worshipping God in their own language and not in Burmese. She grieved for what the Asho did not have, so after finishing her degree, she began praying for her people to one day have their own written language and their own books.

Representatives from the Romanized Asho Chin Literature Committee connected with Bibles International Myanmar Society personnel in 2016 to request literacy aid and a Bible translation using a Roman script. This project, strongly supported by the Asho Chin churches, proved to be worth undertaking for the sake of the believers who still did not have access to the Word of God in their language.

Bibles International adopted the New Testament translation project for the Hill Asho Chin people in 2019 and began literacy work that same year. The first primer in Roman script for the Hill Asho Chin was published in 2023. Training for the Bible translators was conducted in 2021, and the Asho should be producing their first trial portion of Scripture in 2026.