REL 253-4 : Foundations of Mission

The Summer Institute has long been doing laudable linguistic, humanitarian work in many countries, while Wycliffe has been one of the largest, fastest growing, and most controversial Christian missionary enterprises in the world. Aldridge situates this institution within the evolving landscape of mid-twentieth-century evangelicalism, examines its complex and occasionally confusing policies, and investigates the factors that led, despite criticism from many sides, to its remarkable rise to prominence.

1. Is there a place for lay people? -- 2. Organizing the home front -- 3. Adding mission to your life -- 4. The faith promise -- 5. A pause for new direction -- 6. Quality programs with new ideas -- 7. Golden Jubilee -- 8. Ministry through construction and hospitality -- 9. What a difference a team makes -- 10. Maturity based on prayer.

When William Cameron Townsend arrived in Guatemala as a Bible salesman in 1917, the missionaries took one look and said, "That skinny Townsend won't last two months." They were wrong. Today at 85 Uncle Cam is still going strong, still working to bring the Bible to people whose languages have never been written. In the intervening 59 years he has packed several lifetimes of achievements.

Lazaro Cardenas, president of Mexico 1934-40, is less well known for his efforts to 'Mexicanize' indigenous populations and to reduce the power of the conservative Catholic hierarchy. Common aims united Cardenas and Cameron Townsend, an American Protestant missionary. Townsend formed the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a training school for Protestant missionaries who undertook to learn indigenous languages and to translate the Bible into those languages. Townsend’s linguists assimilated into the larger national population and served as evangelists of a fundamentalist form of Protestantism. In doing so, the SIL effort would undermine the Catholic hierarchy, which was seen as a rival of the Mexican state and its plans for secular national development.

Told through private conversations and personal correspondence between Herman Aschmann and the author, with additional insight from Aschmann's family and friends, Translating Christ pieces together the lived of Herman Aschmann, Wycliffe Bible translator, and his wife as they lived and worked among the Totonac people of Mexico. Aschmann's abundance of physical and intellectual energy, linked with a passionate curiosity and empathetic concern for the language and culture of the Totonac people, enabled him to translate three distinct Totonac New Testaments. His became the foundation for the remarkable growth of the Totonac church in Mexico.

Before Cam Townsend died in 1982, he oversaw the development of one of the largest independent mission organizations in the world, Wycliffe Bible Translators. Townsend's remarkable and inspirational story of pioneering missions is continued in this second biography, a follow-up to Wycliffe in the Making, Memoirs of W. Cameron Townsend, 1920-1933.