For the Gospel’s Sake: The Rise of the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics

Townsend in Mexico

Townsend was pragmatic and an opportunist. In the early 1930s the Mexican government embraced indigenismo, intended to provide social uplift to the country’s indigenous peoples and to incorporate them into the wider national life. The effort created a need for field linguists with skills in conducting literacy training. At the time Mexicans with such training were in short supply. Townsend seized upon the opening. On the basis of what might seem slim credentials, he tailored himself and the mission he proposed to form as an answer to Mexico’s need. The Indians the government wanted to help were the very people he as a missionary wanted to work with. Remaking himself as an apologete and publicist for the Mexican government, he found parallels between Mexican socialism and New Testament Christianity. His articles in English and Spanish lavished praise on “Mexico’s educational system and the nation’s efforts to educate the Indians” (41). He gave assurances that the workers he would recruit would be linguistically trained and academically qualified.

The Mexican government was engaged in a long-standing struggle to reduce the Roman Catholic Church’s dominant role in society. Townsend was able to couch his organization’s goal of translating the New Testament into indigenous languages—from which the spread of nonsectarian Protestant churches was expected to flow—in a way that allowed the government to conceive of the undertaking as a potential ally in that struggle. ³

At the time, missionaries were barred from working in Mexico. Knowing this restriction, Townsend resigned from the Central American Mission days ahead of his initial visit to Mexico, shedding the label “missionary.” WBT/SIL would follow suit. North of the border, as members of WBT, a faith mission, they would be missionaries and raise support as such. South of the border the same persons, operating as members of SIL, would do the government’s bidding and would not be missionaries. As linguists in government service, they would reduce unwritten tribal languages to written form, produce grammars and dictionaries, conduct literacy programs, and translate government directives. They would foster patriotism within the indigenous population. They would also translate the New Testament into the vernacular languages, on their own time, so to speak. Official SIL ideology expected some readers of the translated Bibles to become converts who would, on their own, form themselves into indigenous, nonsectarian Protestant churches led by indigenous pastors. But since SIL translators would not carry out clerical functions—that is, they would not become pastors of churches, conduct evangelistic campaigns, or found Bible schools—they, presto, would not be missionaries (46), and SIL would not be a missionary society.

In this way WBT/SIL took on its well-known dual structure, though the dual identity took a while to jell. Incorporation of WBT and SIL as two separate legal entities did not take place until 1942. Since they shared overlapping personnel, a common set of administrators, and a single board of directors (47), WBT/SIL became “effectively a single mission with two corporate identities that were designed to relate to different publics” (10).

The concept may have been “brilliant,” but it was also “replete with contradictions” (8). So, did Townsend gain admission by deception, by hiding his goal of translating the New Testament? No, said Leonard Legters, Townsend’s colleague, who insisted that “the Mexican government must clearly understand what we are doing.” ⁴ Their intention is explicitly stated in the initial proposal they presented to the Mexican government. Later on, Townsend was not always so scrupulous. For example, “Not once did [the organization’s agreement with Peru] explicitly mention Bible translation. Buried in the detailed four-page agreement was the point that SIL would translate ‘books of great moral . . . value.’ This bit of semantic ingenuity was an oblique reference to Bible translation, and such tactics eventually resulted in accusations that WBT-SIL was acting deceitfully” (122).

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Left to right: William Cameron Townsend, Eugene Nida, and Kenneth Pike in Mexico City, 1943. Photo courtesy of Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Early directions and tensions

Townsend needed recruits immediately. From a faith mission background himself, he turned to the faith mission community and Bible colleges. These supplied highly motivated applicants who, however, lacked linguistic qualifications. To train them, he formed Camp Wycliffe, which eventually became the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Questions of identity and purpose quickly surfaced. Appointed to direct the institute, Kenneth Pike and Eugene Nida endeavored to raise its academic standards. In good faith-mission style, Townsend did not want to exclude academically unqualified persons who might be God’s chosen instruments. Eventually a compromise was reached: “applicants possessing a minimum of a high school diploma and some Bible school credits” could attend, but “acceptance by SIL as a missionary-translator” would depend on “adequate academic performance” (59–60).

When the Summer Institute of Linguistics moved to the University of Oklahoma campus, similar tensions emerged. Was the program becoming too secular (in line with SIL’s nonmissionary identity)? Later, seasoned SIL staff questioned “the use of scholarship as a strategy.” Might recognition as “linguistic technicians” be enough (68)? In the post–World War II years “fundamentalist tendencies” and anti-Catholic animus among some students and faculty “threatened to undermine Pike and Nida’s long-standing efforts to garner academic legitimacy for SIL” (67).

So, were WBT/SIL personnel missionaries or not? The answer apparently depended on who was raising the question, and “dual organization was [to become] the most misunderstood of WBT-SIL’s strategies” (111). Townsend muddied the waters by answering both yes and no, at one point going so far as to assert, “We are not now and never have been a missionary organization.” In other contexts, “he referred to WBT-SIL personnel as ‘Wycliffe missionaries.’” In a 1953 letter to SIL members, he declared, “We may not boast about being missionaries, but the opportunities [for witness] we get through our double approach are priceless’” (111).

Though WBT became a member of the “conservative and separatist Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association” (IFMA) in 1949 and Townsend cultivated “an impressive array of contacts among fundamentalist personalities and institutions” (151), Aldridge maintains that WBT did not fully fit that mold. “Fellow missionaries . . . noted that SIL members seemed to have a propensity for concealing their real identity, often referring to themselves as linguists rather than explicitly as missionaries. This remained one of the most persistent complaints throughout the 1950s” (153). That SIL’s practice of service to all encompassed service to Catholics in Peru created a special sore point for IFMA leadership. In 1959 Townsend led WBT out of the IFMA, and the organization eventually aligned itself with the “relatively more irenic evangelicals” (166) associated with the Evangelical Foreign Mission Association (EFMA). In fact, says Aldridge, WBT/SIL can justly claim a place alongside Fuller Theological Seminary as having played a significant role in the rise of the new evangelical outlook that was emerging in the 1940s and 1950s (232–33).

Eugene Nida and WBT-ABS relations

Could a missionary become a nonmissionary simply by crossing a national border? “The semantic elasticity of the dual-organization rhetoric” led charter board member Eugene Nida to resign in September 1953. He explained that “he could no longer tolerate the ‘degree of misrepresentation’ that accompanied ‘the explanation of the SIL-WBT program’” (111). Overall WBT/SIL may not have been fundamentalist and separatist in outlook, but some members were. Controversies around the doctrine of Scripture led William Wonderly to resign in 1955. Nida and Wonderly took “with them to the American Bible Society (ABS) much of the emphasis on translation theory that existed in SIL at the time” (96), entailing a decade-long setback in the theoretical sophistication of WBT/SIL’s translation program.

Since ABS was frequently the publisher of SIL New Testament translations, close cooperation between the two mattered. “When SIL’s New Testament translations became, in varying degrees, more paraphrastic in the mid to late 1960s, ABS began expressing misgivings.” Of one SIL New Testament, Nida commented that it was “good Christian literature but not a translation.” Furthermore, he stated that SIL was “departing further and further from the norms which the Bible Societies have found to be essential for accurate, faithful translation” (98). At root, SIL and ABS held “differing perspectives on the role of the Scriptures in missions and church life. Whereas SIL maintained that the Bible was the cornerstone of its missionary strategy, ABS insisted that the Scriptures were the possession of the church. Put another way, the Bible Society believed the church interpreted the text, whereas SIL argued that the Bible, if appropriately translated into the local idiom, was essentially self-interpreting” (99). “By the late 1960s, the relationship between ABS and SIL was in tatters” (100), and WBT/SIL sought other publishers for its translations. By the 1990s, relations were much improved.

Around the time of this controversy, WBT/SIL leadership was disquieted by reports from field staff that Bible usage, let alone conversions and the formation of churches, did not seem to be working out as projected by the organization’s core tenet: the Bible translation strategy. In some places, SIL translations were widely used; in others, very little, if at all. Why the disparity? SIL anthropologist Wayne Dye was commissioned to conduct field research on indigenous response. He found “‘dozens of languages where vernacular New Testaments remain[ed] essentially unread’” (100). His research “discredited the idea that the Bible alone was an instrument of Christian conversion. . . . ‘In Mexico less than one convert in a thousand became a believer by reading the Bible alone. In the Philippines . . . none did’” (100). Dye contended that “it was imperative for translators to train church leaders in the application of translated Scriptures to the lives of their church members” (100). Not all in SIL found Dye’s conclusions easy to accept (101), but “by the mid-1980s, the ‘Bible alone’ concept was eroding, . . . and an increasing number of translators were moving closer to the Bible translation strategy long advocated by Eugene Nida” (104). In 2018 the SIL website listed four persons carrying the title “Senior Scripture Engagement Consultant.”

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Left: Evelyn and Kenneth Pike, ca. 1939. Right: Elvira and Cameron Townsend, Norman, Oklahoma, 1943. Photos courtesy of Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Criticisms

For the Gospel’s Sake contains much more. For example, Aldridge reviews the harsh scrutiny, particularly from the anthropological community, that WBT/SIL underwent in the 1970s. In his reading, the anthropological criticisms of WBT/SIL were fueled by a wider leftist and revolutionary fervor spawned in the latter 1960s. As that revolutionary enthusiasm waned, the 1980s saw the level of criticism decline sharply. “WBT-SIL won the debate because it was offering social goods that both the state and indigenous people often desired, or alternatively rejected on their own terms.” Their critics had an ideology but otherwise were empty handed. Those who “could begin to alleviate the very real ills that plagued indigenous peoples, such as malnutrition, poor health, and powerlessness due to a lack of education and illiteracy, had the upper hand” (220–21). The answer is good as far as it goes, but it does not answer all concerns about power differentials, delivering the Gospel while backed by “the full weight of the government” (46), the limitations of economism as a model of human decision making, and differences between the Mexico of the 1930s and that of the 1960s and beyond. Mexico’s capability to staff its own social service projects and its need to find positions for a growing cadre of trained personnel had grown.

Townsend seems to have been somewhat of a loose cannon: full of ideas, impulsive, impetuous, adamant about getting his own way, and not above doing end runs around administrators and boards with whom he disagreed. ⁵ “Rapid expansion and Townsend’s unconstrained exploits and loose management style” led to an “administrative crisis” (186). Townsend himself seems to have conceived of his role as one of creative disruption. Complaining that WBT/SIL leadership “lacked the dynamism that only he could supply,” he contended that someone was required who possessed “daring vision that is thoroughly submissive to God” (187). Not an especially modest self-estimate. For rank-and-file members the lesson was quite different: “Townsend had long ago taught his disciples to think of WBT-SIL strategies as God-given; therefore, it was quite proper to operationalize one’s faith by pursuing the organization’s ends” (224). This seems not far from the faith mission model, supposedly surpassed long before, which sought “candidates who possessed the spiritual mettle required for pioneering missionary service but who would also humbly submit to direction from mission boards that paid no salaries” (3).

WBT/SIL in Peru

If SIL was shaped in Mexico to fit what the government wanted it to be, when Townsend led SIL into Peru in 1945–46, he doubled down. His goal became “to make SIL ‘seem indispensable . . . to the Government’” (136). JAARS (SIL’s airplane and radio communications arm) “effectively became an adjunct of the Peruvian military in the mid-1950s,” including “carrying military personnel and transporting prisoners to the penal colony at Sepa” (136). In Peru, he at last had the chance to turn his vision of using airplanes into reality. But as usual, he had more than one agenda in play. Even while airplanes strengthened SIL’s air of indispensability for the government, they played a role in giving substance to SIL’s policy of service to all. Townsend “instructed JAARS pilots never to overfly a Catholic mission station without stopping at least to drop off a newspaper or offer to pick up mail. Ideally pilots would invite Catholic priests or nuns aboard SIL’s aircraft, thereby relieving them of long and hazardous foot or canoe journeys.” But “it would be naïve to assume that Townsend’s motives for insisting on these practices were unadulterated. His pilots were expected to carry cameras for the express purpose of snapping photographs of Catholic missionaries boarding SIL airplanes” (145–46). The pictures were later used effectively in public relations campaigns and to deflect pressure mounted by the Catholic hierarchy against SIL. Townsend’s public relations campaigns and assiduous personal diplomacy worked so well that when pressure was mounted to force the government to expel SIL, it was quickly deflected. He made friends in high places, including ones who warned him when SIL was acting “too missionary” and needed to back off.

Townsend’s “willingness to ignore church-state boundaries in serving governments [paid] handsome dividends” (131), and he became “unyielding in his insistence that the patterns established in Mexico and Peru were inviolable” (148). But saying so does not make it so. Was he correct? Aldridge does not really address the questions that Todd Hartch raises about SIL’s extreme subservience to the state or Townsend’s “idio-syncratic” interpretation of Romans 13. ⁶ I wish he had. Doing so might have led to some tempering of the book’s triumphalist tone.

Concluding observations

Though written by an insider—Boone Aldridge has been part of WBT/SIL for two decades—For the Gospel’s Sake is far from a whitewash. It considers substantive issues. Aldridge acknowledges missteps made along the way, including a flexible relation to truth and honesty: “Townsend had long taught his troops that a partial truth was not equivalent to falsehood. . . . WBT-SIL took on a measure of its founder’s pragmatism, and was therefore, at least on occasion, willing to obfuscate rather than clarify its actions as a means of accomplishing its goals” (220). When the organization was accused from the outside, Aldridge vigorously rallies evidence in its defense. He has the insider’s advantage of access to archives and to insights supplied through contact with old-timers and uses them to good effect. Throughout the period covered by this book, WBT and SIL were a single mission with two identities. In an epilogue, Aldridge indicates that during the past several decades the two have moved progressively toward distinct identities, separate executives, and in 2008 “nonoverlapping boards of directors for each organization” (239). The two organizations, he states, are equipped to relate to different communities. But he goes on to ask, “Will the two organizations, now fully independent of one another, drift apart?” He correctly responds, “Only time will tell” (239).

Though richly detailed, For the Gospel’s Sake does not give anything like a complete account—as though any single volume could—of Townsend or WBT/SIL, even though Aldridge restricts his account largely to WBT/SIL’s first five decades. The volume should be read together with Todd Hartch’s Missionaries of the State, a study of SIL’s first half century in Mexico, and A New Vision for Missions, a biographical study of Townsend by William Svelmoe. Half centuries seem to be in vogue; Svelmoe, a son of WBT/SIL who grew up in the Philippines, covers the first fifty years of Townsend’s life, giving delightful cultural translations between faith missions discourse and ordinary English speech. To these three I would add a fourth, Wayne Dye’s Bible Translation Strategy. ⁷ A crucial piece of field research if there ever was one, it shows exactly what was at stake in what Dye calls the Bible translation ideology and what changes needed to be made if SIL’s ultimate desire, spiritual fruit, was to become reality.