Discovery in Community
American businessman and author Stephen R. Covey once said: “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
Over the past two decades, as the Wycliffe Global Alliance has determined its collective identity, missiological consultations have played a large role. They represent a chance to check the positioning of Covey’s figurative ladder—and not just for an individual organisation. When a diverse group of people gathers to listen, reflect, think and pray together about a topic relevant to God’s mission, the global Bible translation movement—and the global church—benefit. In fact, it yields a clearer view of the Kingdom of God.

Participants pray during the Indonesian National Missional Consultation in October 2016. In the small fishing village of Ratatotok in northern Sulawesi, Immanuel Church hosted Indonesia’s fourth annual National Missional Consultation. Visitors came from 28 different denominations and 24 organisations, representing Bible translation projects, churches, ministries, denominations, training centres and community development organisations. Photo: Marc Ewell.
The Alliance facilitated 28 missiological consultations between 2006 and 2019. As the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alliance plans to begin holding consultations again in 2023.
Purposes and outcomes differ each time. In the forthcoming book, A Missional Leadership History: The Journey from Wycliffe Bible Translators to the Wycliffe Global Alliance, authors Kirk Franklin, Susan Van Wynen and editor Deborah Crough list some:
- Ensuring an intended discussion process starts off on a sound biblical foundation;
- Evaluating a set of documents pertinent to a group;
- Setting direction;
- Assessing or confirming current philosophies and practices; or
- Introducing new learning.
Making a real difference

From a 2017 consultation in Holzhausen, Germany. Photo: Phil Prior.
Consultations encourage collaborative reflection, where everyone’s thoughts and opinions really do matter and people aren’t just there to discuss a decision that has already been made. Bryan Harmelink, now the Alliance’s director for collaboration, did not attend a 2012 consultation held in Ghana, but the result influenced him in taking a role with the Alliance. The topic was community. He remembers being impressed that the gathering created space for people to have a real voice in what the Alliance would become.
“The results of that discussion actually led to changes that the board made in some of the bylaws and other ways that the Alliance functions,” he says. “That was remarkable, to witness something that was not just top-down decisions being communicated, but more from the organisations themselves. Their voices were making a difference.”
Hannes Wiesmann is transitioning from his role as Europe area director into a new position as assistant to the executive director, where he will help plan and facilitate consultations. He loves the gatherings’ collaborative atmosphere.
“Because it’s not a preconceived outcome that we have to get to, you are just all ears and your senses are open and we want to listen to the Spirit and how he leads,” Hannes says. “You are just trying, in this instant, to understand what is happening and why is God bringing all of these different voices and circumstances. … What does it all mean? And it’s really amazing at the end, oftentimes, what comes out. You realise, Oh, this was not a coincidence. There is Someone behind this.”
Who attends?

The leader of FATEB (a seminary in Bangui, CAR) gives a comment at the second Francophone Initiative Consultation, held in Cotonou, Benin in 2013. Photo: Heather Pubols.
Consultations are invitation-only and generally are not widely publicised beforehand. But that is not to exclude anyone. Rather, it is about setting the table for the best possible outcomes.
“The composition of a group is quite closely monitored,” Hannes says. “You want to keep it as small as possible but as big as necessary.”
The idea is to ensure that attendees can engage with the topic and that they represent a broad spectrum of the Alliance. Often, invitations are recommended by organisation directors, in communication with their Alliance area director.
“We at the leadership team level don’t always know who the appropriate people would be,” Bryan says. “It’s going to be someone at the organisation level who would know.”
Still, only a tiny fraction of Alliance organisation members will ever attend a formal consultation. But if things go well, they will experience the impact.

Bryan Harmelink
“One of the unintended consequences of the big group consultation events was creating the impression that this could only be done as an event,” Bryan says, “instead of realising that this is a way of thinking and a way of approaching topics that can be part of conversations.
“One of our concerns has been, how do we get this kind of missiological thinking to seep into the ways Alliance organisations do their processes locally? ... Instead of thinking, In 2023 I’m going to go to a consultation, and that being the only place where this kind of thing can happen.”
‘A miraculous process’
All of this reflecting might frustrate a leader who prefers clearly defined problems, pragmatic solutions and fast, predictable outcomes.

Hannes Wiesmann
“It may seem, and we were often criticised especially in the early years, that this is just lofty talking and doesn’t really have any practical effect whatsoever,” Hannes says. “I would argue that it’s one of the very effective ways of sustainable change in the long-term.”
His best example is the 2015 unanimous decision to change an Alliance bylaw, from 29 voting organisations to all 100-plus organisations being equal.
“I think that’s really a miraculous process,” Hannes says. “The organisations that pay the majority of our bills said, ‘We are happy to be in the same category of organisations as the small ones that have a handful of people and hardly any money.’”
The decision happened, he adds, because everyone in the room knew that, missiologically, this was the right thing to do.
“To actually have the courage and the ability and willingness to do that, I think, was fueled by years of missiological reflection. So while it may be difficult to trace or to see the effects of individual consultations in the short-term, I think long-term over the years they profoundly shaped our values and our culture in really deep ways.”
•••
A Missional Leadership History: The Journey from Wycliffe Bible Translators to the Wycliffe Global Alliance, will be released during the opening celebration of November’s Global Connect gathering. The book includes recaps of all 28 missiological consultations facilitated by the Alliance from 2006 to 2019.
Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance
Alliance organisations may download and use the images from this article.
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05/2025 Global

05/2025 Global
‘We’ve come very far, very fast’
A tech observer outlines what AI will mean soon for workplaces and ministry
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Global
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.
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