Wycliffe France’s new beginning
Stewart Johnson remembers hearing a presentation back in 2008 which focused on the men of Issachar. The author of 1 Chronicles wrote that these were people who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.

Stewart Johnson
The message stayed with Stewart through his years as church engagement director for Wycliffe UK. He thought about what it could mean for the 21st century church, ministry and mission.
“I had this revelation that we just carry on doing what we do well, thinking it’s going to be fine in the end,” he says. “I’m not being negative. If it works for people, praise God. His grace and his abilities far outstrip ours.”
But he also knew that serious rethinking could be in order—and never more so than during the past two years as he has served as interim director of Wycliffe France. It has been a rare opportunity to help restart and reimagine an organisation that, for various reasons, officially had no remaining field missionaries. They certainly still had strong connections with French people working abroad in Bible translation. But, administratively it made more sense to have all of those individuals or families re-sent by their church denominations rather than Wycliffe France.
All of which meant that in 2021, as the pandemic forced all mission organisations to rethink, Stewart approached his new assignment with the men of Issachar in mind—not in the sense of telling Christians what they should think and do, but of gaining wisdom and clarity by going to churches and listening. They simply ask questions relating to missio dei, the mission of God. Questions like:
- What is God is laying on your hearts as a church, in terms of mission both at home and further afield?
- How did COVID impact you and your church? Both positively and negatively?
- Is there one advantage that COVID gave you that you have maintained?
- Which downloadable resource would you want from Wycliffe France tomorrow and be able to use the day after?
The questions all lead to a conclusion: God still has a mission for his churches in France and it's up to individuals and churches to work out what that is. Which relates directly to Wycliffe France’s mission statement: “Serving French churches who share the same ideal that all people can be transformed by the Word of God.”
“And you hope that almost like a grain of mustard seed, it sticks,” Stewart says. “It takes time. We’re building relationships. We constantly have to steer conversations away from old-fashioned ways of talking about Bible translation, where Wycliffe does the work. You’ve got to talk about friends and partners.”

Thérèse Stauder and Stewart Johnson promote Wycliffe France at a gathering of pastors and church leaders in Paris.
Two streams
As an organisation with few staff members or sustainable resources, they also decided on a tighter strategy. As a Wycliffe Global Alliance member, Wycliffe France would focus on two of the seven Participation Streams: prayer and the life of the church.
“Everything that we have done and everything that we have built in the last two years has literally revolved around those two orbits,” Stewart says. “The first posture is obviously to say to the church, “Hey, we would like you praying. Please go to our website, join the Facebook group, we have WhatsApp groups as well, we have a Zoom prayer meeting.”
The prayer emphasis starts with Wycliffe France’s board and extends to everyone in the organisation’s orbit.
“They know that they’re not just praying for themselves or praying for an individual partner in mission somewhere in the world,” Stewart says, “but they are actually praying into the life and the well-being of specific Alliance organisations.”
Wycliffe France’s website contains not just prayer requests, but theological reasons why it is so important, how it relates to attributes like generosity, and why God is calling the church in France to pray.
Five communities
Then, they narrowed Wycliffe France’s focus even further by identifying five “Communities of Interest and Engagement”:
- LSF—the Deaf sign language of France
- The Roma people living in France and throughout Europe
- Ongoing Bible translation work in Siberia
- The neighbouring francophone West African countries of Togo and Benin
- and the francophone Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The philosophy behind the choices was that we feel that French churches, particularly post-COVID, are coming back into life and energy, and they needed to understand that they could be involved in the mission of God,” Stewart says. “You don’t want to confuse people with too many choices. It’s quite hard because you are almost burning many other bridges to have one in place.”
A big part of choosing those five communities was to help French people realise there are communities in their own country who need Bible translation – namely, about 100,000 in the Deaf community who use French Sign Language; and the Roma people which number 250,000 to 300,000 in France at any given moment (The number varies because many Roma groups are nomadic, moving from country to country in Europe.)
A direct connection
It's all intended to engage churches directly with impacted communities, rather than treating individual missionaries as churches’ primary focus of engagement, prayer and financial support.
“One of the things that the board was very clear about,” Stewart says, “was that they wanted me to facilitate the direct sending of people, not even necessarily through Wycliffe France but from their churches to one of these Communities of Interest and Engagement.”
In such a scenario, Wycliffe France becomes a third-party facilitator of relationships that engage churches, or even other mission organisations, with Bible translation work in those five communities. With churches, those relationships are often initiated by telephone surveys conducted by Wycliffe staff and volunteers—again, asking churches how they’re doing and what they need, rather than asking them to support missionaries.
“It’s like there’s a bilateral stream now,” Stewart says. “You have all the good of the past, that is being garnered and promoted as well as people parachuting into the paradigm we used to join Wycliffe. And then you’ve got this brand-new stream.”
He compares the new paradigm to a dinner party that takes on a life of its own—even though it takes lots of planning and work for things to reach that stage.
“The people get so fixated, so excited about what’s going on in different places that Wycliffe France kind of draws back or starts to grandparent the thing. You recognize your grandparents are in the room, but they’re not the ones cooking or out there dancing.”
• • •
Practical hints for Alliance organisations
From Stewart Johnson
- Take time to focus. Take your time to do your research. Then survey churches. We find any excuse to do surveys. We came out of COVID saying, “Hey, we really want to know how COVID affected you and what was the one advantage?” Another survey was, we saw that during COVID, lots of churches were scratching around for downloadable resources. Which resource would you want tomorrow and be able to use the day after? And it was always kids’ stuff.
When you talk to other churches and you already know what they know, it really gets you respect. And so we are able to manage expectations for a church, and already get a sense of what they want to do and what they want to hear about. So ultimately when we do church engagement, we are talking about the mission of God, why the mission of God is important and why it is the agent for mission. Then we talk very specifically about one of those five Communities of Interest and Engagement. - We do want churches to be really excited. We do want them to send people overseas. Because we want to see churches sending their people to be involved in these Communities of Interest and Engagement, and it's really difficult to send them through Wycliffe France at the moment, we've done lots of research on how to set up a local charity.
- Because our approach looks so different than it once did, we have to have different indicators of performance and we have to have very, very clear moments where we celebrate the good stuff that’s happening. Because we do also have dark nights of the soul.
Stewart Johnson may be reached at: directeur@wycliffe.fr
• • •
Story: Jim Killam and Gwen Davies, 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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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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