Fairy rings or circles
Have you ever seen a fairy ring? They are in open grass land that has been cleared of trees. They are rings of darker grass. The darker grass is due to extra nitrogen made available in that area. You can see them the most clearly in the spring and early summer if you look out a second story window.
Fairy rings are a phenomena that shows local development of a certain family of fungi. Fairy rings become visible when they are about six inches across. The rings expand each year and can be anywhere from two feet to hundreds of feet in diameter. One of the largest rings ever found is in France. It is thought to be about 2,000 feet in diameter and over 700 years old. On the “South Downs” in southern England, there are huge fairy rings that appear to be several hundred years old.
We are seeing only a small part of the fungus. The fungus grows underground as a thread-like mass expanding outward. It tends to grow in all directions from a central point. The part toward the center is dying each year. The decayed matter enriches the soil and thus we can see a ring of dark grass. The growth is a circle just outside the dark grass. After a rain, you can see mushrooms spring up from that invisible circle.
The term “fairy ring” comes from a superstition that the darker grass in the circle represents the path where fairies have danced and where they come back to dance again. Other superstitions suppose that the mushrooms are the tables or stools of the fairies.
I suggest that oral translation of the Scripture will be like a fairy ring. It will start with one or two languages in a single location. The translation teams who begin to orally translate and distribute their products can motivate others who speak other languages to want to learn to translate orally. Those new translators, in turn, will motivate speakers of other languages. The rings will keep on expanding! They will be self-propagating!
