Wycliffe Associates’ goal is a Bible in every language by 2025. Brent Ropp, who serves as their Vice President of Operations, confirms that translation is speeding up.
He goes on to explain that with the acceleration of cluster languages [languages that share more than 80 percent of their vocabularies], translation in parallel [translating several Bible books at the same time] and the advance of the missions movement, in general, local language groups can take ownership of their own Bible translation.
“The growth of the Church among Bible-less language groups has come to the place now, where they are technically able to do this work themselves. Our role is to simply provide training, tools and resources for them, so that they can do Bible translation on their own.”
Church growth: Bible plea
This is happening in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Nigeria. Previously, these Bible-less people groups were in areas where the church was very young or non-existent, he notes.
Today, “Most of these language groups now have pastors and church leaders with many years of experience, and in a lot of cases, theological higher-level education as well. They are the best source of testing and assuring accuracy of the Scriptures.”