This is the third part of a five-part blog series on who we are, what we do and why we think it is worth doing. As we said in our second post, we are the Wisbeys and we are ‘with Wycliffe’…
Across the world there are over 200 million people who still do not have access to God’s word - the Bible - in the language they understand the best. To us, first language English speakers, that may be a little difficult to comprehend, but understanding this simple fact was one of the reasons we ended up working with Wycliffe.
Wycliffe Bible Translators is a Christian charity committed to the vision that:
‘by working with churches, organisations and individuals from around the world all people will have access to God's word in a language that they truly understand.’
It is named after John Wycliffe, an English philosopher who translated the Bible from the language of the highly educated (at the time), Latin, to English, making it available to the masses.
Wycliffe Bible Translators was formed in 1942 by William Cameron Townsend, an American missionary who in his efforts to sell Spanish Bibles in Guatemala was challenged by the need for translation when someone asked him: “If your God is so great, why doesn’t he speak in my language?” Challenged by this question Townsend learnt the local language, created an alphabet for it, analysed the grammar and translated the New Testament. He later founded a training school to equip young translators (and other workers) and in time this grew into Wycliffe.
But it doesn’t stop there. Wycliffe’s vision – to see the Bible available to all people – means that its work is primarily with small, excluded and marginalised people groups. Working with such people groups brings other challenges and responsibilities outside of the primary task at hand (poor health, lack of education etc.), and Wycliffe works with these communities to help address these needs. One particular way they do this is through literacy, often working with the government and other NGOs to set up educational programmes that build upon communities existing knowledge. This is particularly important because it has been demonstrated that there are clear connections between quality education (to which literacy is foundational) and progress in other areas of development (such as those laid out by the ‘Millennium Development Goals’). More on this in a later post!
Wycliffe Bible Translators adopts a ‘member-own support raising’ model. This means that every Wycliffe member needs to develop their own team of financial and prayer partners to meet their living and ministry needs. We do not receive a salary from Wycliffe for our work, instead we need to raise our finances from individual and church gifts. If you’d like to support this work by joining our team of financial partners just click here.