Ministry

Serving with Wycliffe Bible Translators

We are part of a very exciting ministry with Wycliffe, one that we never would have dreamed of when we first started out. You see, we were motivated to be the pioneer translators who would "stand in the gap" for a lost people group who would otherwise never receive the Gospel message of salvation. Our motivation was not one of pity, but one of love for our creator and the desire to see his name be praised by people from every nation, tribe, people, and language as we are promised in Revelation 7:9-10 (NLT)

After this I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. And they were shouting with a great roar, “Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne and from the Lamb!”

God would bring people from those many obscure languages (some yet unwritten), and we felt his calling to use us. Many years later, we were at the typesetter and publishing the New Testament in the Fulfulde language for the Fulani people in Mali, West Africa, accomplished through an effective inter-missional team of translators of which we were part.  The Lord was preparing us all along, however, for the  next phase of ministry, stated in our motto:

Harnessing technology to expedite the translation of God's Word in all languages

Today God has taken my (Doug's) love for technology and combined it with my experience in Bible translation to start a new type of ministry.  It is my job to assure that our field teams learn how to use new technology that can speed up and enhance the work of translating the Scriptures into other languages.  To date, there are still an estimated 1,967 remaining languages around the world with no portions of the Scriptures yet.

The new technology ensures that the language development and Bible translation work is done efficiently and that the data is kept safe, with backups stored in more than one location.  I maintain a number of websites where people can learn about the best technology to use for language learning, for doing linguistic analysis, for translation, or for many other tasks involved in the process of providing people with access to the Scriptures in their mother tongue.

Serving Semi-Nomadically

After serving three years at the Black Forest Academy (BFA), Priscilla retooled to become an e-Publication Designer. She takes the electronic files that are authored primarily by SIL staff and republishes them into ePub file format. Serving in this role, Priscilla is availalble to travel with me to various training events for Bible translators held around the world.  Half of our time is spent globally and the rest of our time we work from a home office in Michigan.