He Lived To Translate

He Lived To Translate

God can be trusted to work out the details.

CAMERON “CAM” TOWNSEND was born in California in 1896. At the age of twelve he joined the Presbyterian church in which he was raised. Afterward his father, who was deaf, took him out into the barn and questioned him about his faith. Cam wrote out the answers so his father could be satisfied that his son had a personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

In 1917 Townsend went to Guatemala to sell Spanish Bibles to the Cakchiquel Indians. But Townsend soon realized that the Cakchiquel Indians had no use for Spanish Bibles and were often offended by his efforts to sell them. One day an Indian asked him, “If your God is so smart, why hasn’t he learned our language?”

That question burned in his mind until he determined to translate the gospel of Mark into Cakchiquel himself. With that task completed, Townsend proceeded to translate the rest of the New Testament. Upon its completion in 1929, the Cakchiquels exclaimed, “Now God speaks our language.” This gave Cam the motivation to translate the Bible into yet another language.

A prominent Mexican educator visited Townsend and was impressed by what he had done for the Indians. After returning to Mexico, he wrote to Townsend saying, “Come to Mexico. Our revolutionary leaders will help you.”

But illness interrupted—Cam contraced tuberculosis, and his wife developed a life-threatening heart condition. They returned to California to recuperate.

Once Townsend had recovered, L. L. Legters, a missionary friend, urged him to go to Mexico, where at least fifty Indian tribes had no Bible in their language. Then news came from Mexico that a new Socialist president had confiscated all religious property and ordered all foreign missionaries to leave the country.

Legters traveled to New Jersey to America’s Keswick, a Bible conference, where on August 10, 1933, there was a day of prayer for Mexico and Townsend’s vision for translating the Bible into tribal languages there. When Addison Raws, Keswick’s director, announced that the leaders would be fasting for the day, no one went to the dining hall. Legters and his wife prayed all night in the auditorium.

Those at Keswick were so sure that God would answer their prayers that they encouraged Townsend and Legters to go immediately to Mexico and ask permission to do their Bible translation work. They later learned that at the same time, a group at Keswick in England was praying for the Indians of Mexico.

Cam sent his wife to stay with her parents while he and Legters headed for the Mexican border. When they were denied entry, Townsend brought out the letter from the Mexican educator, and they were allowed to enter.

Through an amazing series of contacts Townsend met Mexico’s director of rural education in Mexico City, who gave Townsend permission to study Mexico’s rural education system for six weeks and was pleased with the analysis Cam wrote.

So sure were Townsend and Legters that Mexico would be open to them that they organized a three-month translation school in a barn in Arkansas for training Bible translators. They called it “Camp Wycliffe,” naming it after John Wycliffe, the first translator of the Bible into English. The three students and four faculty members sat in the barn on nail kegs.

The Townsends went to Mexico in 1935 with their students and began to translate the Bible into tribal languages. Wycliffe Bible Translators grew to become the largest independent Protestant mission agency in the world. At the time of Townsend’s death in 1982 half of the world’s five thousand languages still did not have any portion of Scripture, but half did—because of Cameron Townsend.

Reflection

Do you think it is important for people to be able to read the Bible in their mother tongue? Children from immigrant homes often pray for the rest of their lives in the language of their land of origin. One’s first language is the language of the heart.

We all hear these people speaking in our own languages about the wonderful things God has done!

Acts 2:11