Blog #1 – New Century Ministries

I’m Charlie Webster. I’d recently completed my masters’ degree in New Testament studies in 2004 when I formed New Century Ministries as a non-profit ministry to research the problems facing American Christianity and to look for solutions. A simple Internet search will provide plenty of information about Christianity’s rapid decline in America. Assuming the New Testament is true (which I do), nothing could be more important than this ministry.

Since then, my financial backing and labor have been the sole support for this ministry. While the ministry has provided help to several people in need, most of the effort has been focused on understanding and finding realistic solutions for the problems facing American Christianity.

At the time that this ministry was first started, I’d already been researching the problems. As I started the ministry, I began by writing a few books to help people understand and properly respond to the problems I was finding. As I wrote these books, wherever I quoted something from the New Testament, I found it was necessary to translate the passage from the Greek in order to provide a translation that would be accurate and easily understood. In doing this, I began to understand that a significant part of the problems facing Christianity came from traditional translations of the New Testament. I kept thinking that someone needed to do a better job of translation to help people see and understand the wonderful message God intended.

About 2007, I decided to get serious about the translation problems. I began with the account of Jesus’ life and teachings found in the four Gospel accounts in the New Testament. To better communicate the message, I decided to blend the four accounts into one account in conversational English. In 2012, I published his initial effort at translating these books, including the first chapter of Acts as an important part of the account of Jesus’ life and teachings.

However, I soon realized that this account was incomplete without something to tell what happened after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, so I continued my translation work. This effort grew into a new translation of the whole New Testament, but from the beginning of my translation work, I realized that, while a person could get the essential message from even the flawed traditional translations, knowing the historical and cultural backgrounds of the New Testament writings could improve understanding. So I developed an extensive document that I called a glossary with over 200 articles on the historical and cultural backgrounds. I researched the work of many scholars to learn the realities of New Testament times as they pertain to the Bible.

I completed my translation of the New Testament and my work on the glossary in 2024 and submitted the translation for publication. This translation is called the 21st Century New Testament. For anyone interested in knowing the message of the New Testament, this translation is significantly better than any other English translation available today. This is definitely not traditional because the traditional translations are wrong in too many places. For those who would like to know why the traditional translations needed to change, see blog #2.

The original New Testament writings were in the language people used in the markets and streets of Jesus’ time, so I prepared this new translation in conversational English, the way most Americans use it daily. The method I used for translating was to study the original message as the authors wrote it to gain an in-depth understanding of the author’s ideas and then communicate those ideas in whatever conversational English words would do the best job of carrying the same thoughts clearly. Sometimes this meant adding a few words to let the reader know things that a first-century reader would’ve assumed.

Believing that people should be able to read the New Testament in their heart language, one of my goals is to eventually provide editions of this translation in the dialects of England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Liberia, India, and any other country or territory where English is spoken by a large portion of the population. I want New Century Ministries to provide every English-speaking culture with a translation in the heart language of that culture. But my goal also goes beyond English to provide equivalent translations in the heart languages of every culture on earth. And beyond that, my goal is to see this ministry and others provide training and devotional materials to help Christian ministry teams become the tool God wants them to be, ministering to needs all over the world without a huge bureaucracy.

The bottom line is that I created New Century Ministries to combat the problems facing American Christianity. A major part of that goal involves spreading the good news of Jesus to the whole world in terms no longer affected by the paganism that crept into Christianity long ago, and the 21st Century New Testament is a powerful attack on that paganism.