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100 Years Later, 100 Organizations Strong: Following the Footsteps of God

One hundred years ago, in October 1917, Cameron Townsend, a college student from California, stepped off a steamship onto the streets of San José, Guatemala. Townsend had accepted a friend's challenge to take a year off from college to do missionary service. He volunteered as a traveling salesman, selling Spanish Bibles in the interior of Guatemala, and sharing the gospel with people he met along the way. Townsend had planned to return to the US at the end of his commitment, to finish his education and become a pastor. However, God was calling him to a work that would have a much greater Kingdom impact. For it was in Guatemala that Townsend met Francisco Díaz, a committed Cakchiquel Christian who became the catalyst to ignite an innovative new movement in missions that would eventually spread around the globe: the translation of God's Word into peoples’ heart languages.

Francisco Díaz, who helped start the global Bible translation movement, poses with his wife

Francisco Díaz, who served alongside Cameron Townsend selling Spanish Bibles, quickly became a close friend and mentor to the passionate young worker from the North. Together they spent hours walking the trails from town to town, farm to farm, selling Bibles and sharing God's good news – and seeing lives changed. Díaz translated for Cakchiquel people they met along the way, and Townsend was impressed with his ability to communicate biblical truths to other Cakchiquels. Through his relationship with this quiet Christian man, Townsend soon became aware of a large gap in the missions efforts in the beautiful country of Guatemala: Sixty percent of Guatemalans were indigenous, yet mission efforts were focused solely on reaching the Spanish-speaking population, the Ladinos. Townsend became convinced that reaching the Cakchiquel people required speaking their language. He also soon realized that for them to truly understand the Scriptures, they would need to have God's Word in Cakchiquel, so that they could read it for themselves.

Cameron and Elvira Townsend learned Cakchiquel to work with Díaz in Bible translation

A partnership was born. Díaz, with Townsend's help, set out to start a Cakchiquel-language school, and Townsend, by then newly married, began with his wife to learn the Cakchiquel language in earnest. Soon they began work together with Díaz to translate the Bible into Cakchiquel. It was not easy, especially when obstacles were thrown in their way. Townsend's mission organization was not ready to adopt this new way of working. Then, tragically, Díaz contracted malaria and died, leaving Townsend without a translation partner. But Francisco Díaz's historic legacy had been firmly established by God: the birth of a Bible translation ministry that would eventually reach around the world.

Today – a hundred years after Townsend set foot on Guatemalan soil and learned from Díaz that not all people had access to hearing about God in their own languge – about 100 organizations around the world that make up the Wycliffe Global Alliance are involved in Scripture translation, or in support of the Bible translation movement. The seed of this vision began with the relationship between these two men, who came from two different cultures, and spoke two different languages, but whose hearts and footsteps met in one mission – that the message of the gospel, and the truths of God's written revelation, become available to people in the language that they understand best.

The Townsends with Cakchiquel school children

Please celebrate with us the 100th anniversary of a young 21-year-old cross-cultural worker following the footsteps of God as he entered Guatemala. And for the 35-year-old Cakchiquel man who walked the trails alongside him, and taught him so much, as they shared the gospel and Bibles in villages throughout Guatemala and in neighboring countries. Praise God for all that he has done to build a network of people and organizations around the world to accomplish the translation of his Word into thousands of languages. Pray for the steps taken each day by people in about 100 Bible translation organizations worldwide that make up the Wycliffe Global Alliance. They are committed to coming alongside language communities that are translating God's Word into the languages that speak to their hearts.

There is much work left to be done. What steps will you take to be part of God's mission to reach all peoples who need to learn of God's love through his Word?

Story: Gwen Davies, Wycliffe Global Alliance

Read more about the history of the Bible translation movement and the Wycliffe Global Alliance: Beginning of a Movement

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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? Is that leading to better relationships? Is that creating better vocational outcomes? Is that a valid view of a spiritual perspective?’ We need good underlying data associated with each one of these. And for that we’re actively involved. We’re driving to create that underlying data set. Because we need to show up with good data if we’re going to influence how AI is created. How should this work? For the AI systems we need to create good benchmarks. If I ask about God, does it give me a good answer or not? If I ask about relationships with my children, does it give me good answers? We need to create the corpus of data to give good answers to those questions. And, armed with that good data, we need to show up to influence the total landscape of AI. We want to benchmark OpenAI. We’re going to benchmark Gemini. We’re going to benchmark Claude. We’re going to benchmark Copilot. 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.