Pioneers Who Blazed the Way
Pioneers Who Blazed the Way
“Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in.” Hebrews 12:1 The Message
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Hebrews 12:1 NIV
I am blessed to have a strong heritage of love, faith, and valuing God’s word. My father, my mother, my uncle, my aunt - all of them were Bible Translators. My great great grandfather, my grandfather and my grandmother were pastors. My German grandmother prayed for me every day.
John Lewis in the television show Finding Your Roots said, “We all come from someplace, we have some connection. It’s important to know it. Sometimes you feel you own this piece of real estate on this planet alone, but you’re not. There’s a connection.”
Wycliffe Associates had 40 fruitful years of assisting Bible Translation organizations by organizing volunteers, opening hospitality homes, raising finances, arranging transportation, and providing support in any way they could, as needed.
A new idea came along, and they didn’t just snatch it up, they embraced it at the expense of everything else. They decided to become a Bible Translation organization, cooking up a method called Mobilizing Assistance Supporting Translation, MAST, through which they claim, “by the end of the two-week workshop, they had translated and checked the entire New Testament.”[i]
Think of twenty people from your church who are strong Christians but haven’t formally studied the Bible at all. Knowing that being picked for such a project will bring status and possibly future work, you can imagine there would be many people eager to be a part of a paid job. Can you picture their faces?
Now think of those people making a part-time commitment for two years, and a full-time commitment for two weeks. The two weeks is a combined training and translation time. At the end of the two weeks, whatever they have ‘completed’ is printed and bound. The books are given to your whole congregation and called ‘God’s Word’.
Would you read a Bible that had been translated from a related language by a group of twenty people at your church who dedicated just two weeks, and then pronounced it finished?
I would not!
If you were starting a new mission and had a strong relationship with another organization doing that work successfully for decades, wouldn’t you go to them and pick their brains, round up all the techniques you could, and research programs that have worked for them to speed up the process? Or would you start from scratch with a new idea and hope it worked. Wycliffe Associates did the latter.
They took their 40 years of experience as a supporting organization and threw it out the window. They destroyed their strong relationship with expert Bible translators and indirectly said, “We don’t need you. We don’t want to support you. We can do this better than you with NO experience,” and may I add, “a lot of money from your supporters.”
Under the MAST process, Wycliffe Associates rely on a small local team to bear the responsibility of determining whether a translation is ‘good’ or not. Certainly, this trend of moving to more local empowerment is a positive one, but it seems to me this is going so far it is covering up abuse of God’s Word.
It is because of the foundation that was built by previous Bible Translators that Wycliffe Associates even exists. Build on that foundation! Yes, you can build a new and modern house, but not without a foundation and acknowledgement of those who have gone before and all they have learned.
We should praise those who have gone before, walk in their footsteps, and ask, “First can I learn from you. Maybe you’re your help I can do more? Maybe I can I do it faster?”
What is your heritage, and how can you build on that?
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