Curious about how Wycliffe was founded? Then let’s start at the very beginning...a very good place to start, don’t you think?
William Cameron Townsend, also known as “Uncle Cam”, was just a young man when he decided to try to spread the gospel by selling Spanish Bibles in the country of Guatemala. But most of the native people that he met didn’t actually understand Spanish. So Townsend began living among the Cakchiquel people who didn’t even have an alphabet for their beautifully complex language. He gave up trying to sell Bibles and settled in to analyzing Cakchiquel and translating the New Testament into it. An astonishing ten years later, Uncle Cam had finished his translation, and his heart was moved for the minority languages of the world that had no access to Scripture in their heart language.So he began “Camp Wycliffe” (named after the first man to translate the entire English Bible, John Wycliffe) in the summer of 1934 in order to begin training men and women in linguistics. What started as a couple of men “roughing it” in the Ozarks eventually became thousands of men and women all around the world involved in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), Wycliffe Bible Translators, Wycliffe Associates, The Seed Company, and JAARS.
Uncle Cam had a grand vision for every language on earth being able to have God’s Word accessible to it’s people, and he devoted his entire life to the pursuit of that dream. He was involved in many translations in Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and the former U.S.S.R. But his legacy certainly didn’t stop with only the places that he personally visited. Millions of people around the world have been impacted for eternity through this one man’s vision of how God could use him. You can read more on Uncle Cam here if you’d like, and we hope that you will be inspired by how God used one seemingly insignificant person to change the world for God’s Kingdom!
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