Day 8 - Fighting Poverty

More than Just Bible Translation

Obviously, Wycliffe Bible Translators exists today to...you guessed it...translate the Bible. But did you know about all of the other benefits of translation for a community?

Bob Creson, the President of Wycliffe USA, recently addressed these benefits to all of the staff working worldwide. The following are excerpts of how he addresses the perception that Wycliffe has little or nothing to do with fighting poverty:

“Two weeks ago, a small team of us from Wycliffe USA spent a few days with Terrill and Amber Schrock in Uganda.  They recently began work with the Ik people, who live in the northeastern corner of the country, on the edge of the Rift Valley.  Terrill is doing language development while Amber supports him through healthcare and community development projects.
 
When I first met them, Amber was providing healthcare in the back of a storage building behind their current home in Kaabong.  She tells me she usually sees 30 people each day, three times a week, but sometimes she sees up to 60 patients in a single day. If a patient is too sick to come to Amber’s clinic, she goes and picks them up and takes them to a hospital. One evening two of our team members—videographer Jon Shuler and Wycliffe Africa member Lydia Teera—rode along with Amber while she picked up a woman in labor, rushed her to the hospital, and helped deliver a healthy baby!
 
Why does Amber do this work? She says she wants to bless people. “My Dad taught us that one way to follow God was through serving other people. After high school, I pursued a career that would let me minister to people’s physical needs,” she explains.  She also sees her service as a way of gaining acceptance into the Ik community. She believes that providing basic healthcare and identifying publicly with the Ik people will help Terrill and her establish rapport with them.
 
 Beyond that, she recognizes the validity of ministering to the whole person. “We really do believe that people need to meet basic needs before they will be open to Bible translation,” she says. “They are thinking about hunger, shelter—not, ‘Who is this man named Jesus?’ Once these basic needs are met, then the Ik people will start thinking, ‘Who is God?’”

“...the facts are that Bible translation has never been done in a vacuum, and the results have never been measured purely in spiritual terms; it’s always been part of a larger package.  It’s always included ministry to the community’s physical, social and economic needs, and that ministry—now called holistic ministry—is an increasingly important part of the story.  For people today—especially younger people—meeting the needs of the whole person is a very high value.  This is not something new that we need to add to our Bible translation ministry. It’s already there.  We just need to learn to talk about it in today’s vocabulary, and let the truth be known.  That’s what Wycliffe USA has begun to do. 

Many are surprised to discover what gets started when Bible translation takes place in a community:  literacy, education, improved healthcare, access to clean water, human rights, government relations, and community empowerment.  All of these, of course, combat poverty.”

If you would like to know more about our holistic ministry in the context of Bible translation, you can find videos and stories on the internet.  For stories, explore www.wycliffe.org and www.wycliffe.net.  For short videos about ministries like health and trauma healing, go to http://www.tangle.com/Wycliffe or http://www.youtube.com/user/WycliffeUSA.   For links to all Wycliffe USA social media, go to http://www.google.com/profiles/wycliffeusa.