Articles for Further Reflection
Reflection on Vision 2025 by Albert Fung [2021]
Albert Fung, the Executive Director of Wycliffe Taiwan, reflects on the impacts of Vision 2025 for the Bible translation movement, and especially on the ongoing journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance.
A Word About the Alliance Covenant by Dr. Stephen Coertze [2021]
In a season when most Wycliffe Global Alliance organisations have signed our Covenant / Statement of Commitment, Executive Director Stephen Coertze explains more fully what action this means and what it does not mean.
Leading in the Certainty of Uncertain Times by Dr. Susan van Wynen [2020]
This research focused on the potential for Christ-following leaders to develop a theological and missiological posture in response to the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world context. This research looks at how the attitudes and actions of the corporate world have influenced those of Christian organisations and Christian leadership. The corporate world primarily focuses on strategies for overcoming the challenges of the VUCA environment, but this research explores how Christ-following leaders might benefit from looking more deeply at what VUCA represents, rather than merely accepting and reacting to it.
The Future of the Bible Translation Movement Survey by Dr. Kirk Franklin and Susan van Wynen [2020]
During the last two weeks of April 2020, an online survey was offered to the directors of Wycliffe Global Alliance organisations. The purpose was to identify what the Bible translation movement could look like during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a means of determining how Alliance organisations were affected, thus far, by the crisis and it offers a glimpse of how leaders are thinking about and preparing for the future.
A missiology of progress: Assessing advancement in the Bible translation movement by Dr. Kirk Franklin [2020]
How do we know what God considers progress in the Bible translation movement and what milestones are theologically significant in the coming decades?
Leading in Global-Glocal Missional Contexts: Learning from the Journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance by Dr. Kirk Franklin [2017]
The journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance is an example of how some paradigm shifts are influencing leading in mission. Since Christianity is both an agent and product of globalization, its beliefs have spread from one source to another, crossing religious, linguistic and cultural contexts. As a result, there are polycentric or multiple centres of influence since Christianity has homes within a diversity of contexts. This carries with it various implications including how partnering in mission needs to be deconceptualized through greater emphasis on friendship.
A paradigm for global mission leadership: the journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance
Developing leaders with a global mindset—how globalization and the mission of God help shape the path forward. Doctoral thesis by Kirk Franklin, Executive Director of the Wycliffe Global Alliance 2008-2020, published by the University of Pretoria, South Africa, February 2016.
Polycentrism in the missio Dei
As Christianity moved farther away from the Christendom model of centralised control to other models of structure and leadership, other paradigms have been proposed along the way. However, one possibility, called the concept of polycentrism, has not been considered with any significant effort.
Funding God’s Mission: Towards a Missiology of Generosity
This article focuses on the question of identifying the missiological implications that arise in the raising of and managing of funds in God’s mission, particularly as the church continues its demographic shift from the West to the global South and East.
Missiological Reflections on Funding
Mission agencies and many other nonprofit organizations have felt the impact of the global financial crisis. This situation calls us to seriously revisit and reevaluate existing funding systems. Our total dependence on God in everything, including funds, is probably the most prominent concept in Scripture.
Vision 2025 and the Bible translation movement
This research focuses on one organisation withing the global Bible translation movement - the Wycliffe Global Alliance. The research explores the historical theological influences on the Alliance, the missiological significance of the translatability of the Bible and the missiological theological implications of Vision 2025. The aim is to determine how the Alliance has responded to these areas in light of the changing global church and mission context.
Missio Dei and Bible Translation
"God ... has a mission in the sense of an overarching purpose, rather than an individual task to perform. His purpose across history is to restore the relationships which were there in the original creation."
Missio Dei and the Mission of the Church
"The concept of missio Dei ... is essentially that the work or mission of the church is a subset of the work of God in the world, rather than something with an independent existence."
Changing Paradigms, Missio Dei and the Seven Streams of Participation
Changing Paradigms, Missio Dei and the Seven Streams of Participation
The Wycliffe Global Alliance and Bible Translation Movements by Kirk Franklin [2012]
A series of 18 articles looking at the implications for the Wycliffe Global Alliance with respect to the church’s demographic shift from the West to the global South and East. These deal with major topics such as the missio Dei, missiological and historical foundations of Bible translation, mission strategy, and mission agency leadership.
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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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