I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to speak to you more personally. Here's a video I recorded for you, and a transcript is below.
Video transcript:
As we start week two of the coronavirus shutdown, you can see I'm set up in my home office here and I just wanted to give you a brief update on how things are going at Wycliffe Associates. As the travel restrictions came into play a week ago—or just a little more than a week ago—we had about a dozen MAST workshops in progress around the world so we had to take steps to go ahead and wind those down, make sure we could leave the local language groups with the right technology they need to continue their work as well as to complete the training so they could go forward with their Bible translations.
And then we had to start working on getting our training staff returned both to the United States as well as to their home countries.
I'm pleased to say that mostly that went well. We still have a handful of people, especially our international staff, some of which are caught behind travel restrictions and not able to get back to their home countries. So you might just keep them in prayer as you reflect on how things are going.
The other thing that we've already begun to realize is that even though this isn't the path that we would have chosen, a lot of the strategies that we've had in place to put resources locally into the communities and the hands of the church in order to steward Bible translation for themselves, are really going to be more important during this particular season of time. And really our strategies are going to be able to continue forward because Bible translation is more dependent on the local people than it is upon us.
And we're actually moving forward with a strategy to invite each of the groups—we've trained about 1,600 groups in the last five years how to do Bible translation themselves—we're encouraging each of them to reach out to a neighboring language group that doesn't have Scripture yet and teach them what they know. We're calling this Each One Reach One, and you'll hear more about this in our communications in the coming days.
So I just want you to know Bible translation is still a priority. It may not seem like an "essential service" or an "essential business" in the current definitions, but for the people around the world I can assure you that this still is a very high priority for them.
The last thing I just want to say is that we're praying for you as well. We know that this is impacting each of our donors, and volunteers, and staff members in a unique way. And we're using the additional time that we have now with the different work schedule in order to spend additional time in prayer and communication with you. We're making phone calls and sending emails as well. And we just want you to know that we care about you, we appreciate your partnership in Bible translation, and we believe that through it all God is going to continue to work to get His word to all of the nations. And we appreciate your partnership in that task. Take care.
