Home Resources Prayer Wycliffe World Day of Prayer – 11th November 2021 Meditations Joyful Service in the Midst of Hardship

Joyful Service in the Midst of Hardship

Stories to encourage and strengthen – Wycliffe World Day of Prayer 2021

John Ommani is the Regional Programmes Manager for the coast region of Bible Translation and Literacy (BTL). In 1997, the BTL leadership asked him to work with the Sabaot committee to plan for the launch of the Sabaot New Testament. John had to make a long journey to Mt. Elgon to meet with the committee, and decided to visit his father in the hospital along the way.

"When I arrived in Kakamega with my wife and sister, we went to the hospital to check on my father. I prayed with him. When I finished praying, my father told me, 'You go ahead with your journey because God has called you to serve him, but when you come back, prepare to host visitors; there will be many.' John dashed home to inform his stepmother that she needed to be at the hospital. Because of the way his father had spoken to him, it seemed like he was not going to live much longer.

While his mother and sister rushed back to the hospital to be with his father, he continued with his 11-hour journey to Mt. Elgon. Due to the lack of transport, Ommani had to walk the final 20 kilometers. When he arrived at Kopsiro, a small village in Mt. Elgon, the first person he met said, “Why are you here? Don't you know that your father has passed on?” "I was shocked, Omani said. “Unknown to me my father had passed on thirty minutes after I left the hospital."

Ommani travelled back home to bury his father. After that event, he returned to Mt Elgon to continue planning for the launch. "When the moment came for the Bibles to be brought to the launch venue, I forgot all the pain I had gone through,” he said. “I forgot all the sad moments that I had experienced. When the women came dancing and singing carrying the Bibles, it was a joyous moment to behold. I broke down in tears. I went behind a tree and wept. I knew what that moment meant to a community. It was as if Psalm 126 was being acted out before me."

Fast forward to the launch plans for the Duruma New Testament in the year 2000. Two days before the launch event, John received the sad news that his second elder sister had passed on. "The death of my sister forced me to a place of deep reflection. I asked myself what it was about launches, that every time I was planning for one, a family member had to die."

The death of his loved ones, sleeping in the car because he could not find a place to sleep, travelling on a lorry, sleeping while hungry were some of the hardships he had to endure during the facilitation of Bible translation. These never deterred John from sharing God's Word with the people he was called to serve.

In his role Ommani assisted in the planning of six Bible launches. Each one of them had a happy ending that came after some hard moments along the way.

"As I look back, in each of those situations, I realized that it is not easy for people to access God's Word in their language,” he said. “The joy of it all is that from those painful moments, God started to speak to me from the Book of Ephesians 4:11-16. We do what we do so that God's people can have access to His Word; to read it, to be grounded in it so that they are no-longer ‘tossed around’ [by false teaching]. It became vivid to me that what I was doing was not going to be easy. I thank God for the lessons, experiences and training that I received at BTL. All of these shaped me to serve and contribute at the international level as the Scripture Access Services Director for SIL International.”

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Special Report - May 2025

‘We’ve come very far, very fast’

A tech observer outlines what AI will mean soon for workplaces and ministry

Tech pioneer: Christians ‘have to show up’ for AI

Silicon Valley pioneer Pat Gelsinger was CEO of Intel Corporation until December 2024. Quickly realising his career in technology was not finished, he joined the faith/tech platform Gloo in early 2025 as the executive chair and head of technology. He is also a general partner at the venture capital firm Playground Global. Gelsinger was instrumental in the development of cloud computing, Wi-Fi, USB and many other everyday technologies. He estimates his work has touched 60 to 70 percent of humanity. Here are highlights of his keynote talk at the 2025 Missional AI Summit. You can watch his entire talk here. Pat Gelsinger (left) is interviewed onstage by Steele Billings. Both are with Gloo. Watch the full interview here. Is technology good or bad? Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral. It can be used for good. It can be used for bad. … If you think back to the Roman roads, why did Christ come when he came? I’ll argue the Pax Romana and the Roman roads. … The greatest technology of the day was the Roman road system. It was used so the Word could go out. Historical example I will argue Martin Luther was the most significant figure of the last thousand years. And what did he do? He used the greatest piece of technology available at the day, the Gutenberg printing press. He created Bibles. … He broke, essentially, the monopoly on the Bible translations …. He ushered in education. He created the systems that led to the Renaissance. That’s a little punk monk who only wanted to get an audience with the pope because he thought he had a few theological errors. I’ll argue (Luther was) the most significant figure of the last thousand years, using technology to improve the lives of every human that he touched at the time. How today compares to the dawn of the internet AI is more important. AI will be more significant. AI will be more dramatic. … This is now incredibly useful, and we’re going to see AI become just like the internet, where every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities. In the 75-year-or-so history of computing, we humans have been adapting to the computer. … With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them. They hear us. They see us for the first time. And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity. And for this and so many other reasons that every technology has been building on the prior technology, AI will unquestionably be the biggest of these waves, more impactful even than the internet was. On the need for AI development to be open-source It is so critical because we’re embedding knowledge, embedding values, embedding understanding into those underlying models, large language models and every aspect that happens. It must be open, and this is part of what I think is critical about us being together here today. We need to be creating trusted, open, useful AI that we can build humanity on. On the need for Christians to help build AI systems We have to show up as the faith community to be influencing those outcomes, because remember what happened in the social media. We didn’t show up, and look at what we got. So are we going to miss this opportunity for something that’s far more important than social networking with AI? Where it truly in the models embeds every aspect of human history and values into it? We have to show up, team. What we do with large language models is far more important because truly we are choosing how we embody knowledge of all time into those underlying models. They need to be open. They need to be trusted. What Christians must bring to the process If we’re going to show up to influence AI broadly, we have to show up with good engineering, good data, good understanding, good frameworks. How do you measure things like ‘Is that leading to better character? 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This is what we’re going to do at Gloo, but we want to be part of a broader community in that discussion so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI. Technology is a force for good. AI that truly embeds the values that we care about, that we want to honour, that we want to be representing into the future and benchmarking across all of them. Oh his role with Gloo We are going to change the landscape of the faith community and its role in shaping this most critical technology, AI, for faith and flourishing. That’s what we’re going to do at Gloo and we need all of your help and partnership to do so because if we don’t hang together, we’re not going to influence the outcome, right? ‘Here am I, Lord’ I don’t think I’m done. … You and I both need to come to the same position like Isaiah did. Here am I, Lord. Send me. Send me. Send us. That we can be shaping technology as a force for good. That we could grab this moment in time. This is the greatest time to live in human history. We’re going to solve diseases. We’re going to improve lives. We’re going to educate every person in poverty. We are going to solve climate issues. We are going to be using these technologies to improve the lives of every human on the planet. We are going to shape technology as a force for good. Here am I, Lord. Send me. ••• Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance Translated with ChatGPT. How was the translation accuracy? Let us know at info@wycliffe.net. Alliance organisations are welcome to download and use images from this series.