Wycliffe Is a Family of Organizations

Introduction

It is so very easy to think of "Wycliffe" as one huge organization with infrastructure all over the world, largely because we usually present what we do, rather than how we are structured.

The truth is more complex. Wycliffe's history, along with differences among the global Wycliffe staff in ethnic, national, and legal domains, have resulted in a Wycliffe "family" of multiple organizations. Each organization, like parts of the human body, performs specialized functions which allow the Wycliffe "body" to do everything required to get the Scriptures to everyone.

The Big Picture

Wycliffe is a family of more than 110 legally independent, separately-chartered organizations with their own boards of directors and headquarters, who are formally linked together by a common purpose (Bible translation) and share a number of interlocking, mutually-adopted methods and procedures.

While many of the Wycliffe organizations have a national character and/or primary working location in a specific country, others are international and have geographically dispersed internal entities.

The final layer of complexity is that "Wycliffe" organizations also work directly and increasingly closely with other non-member organizations (both religious and secular) whose goals are either the same as ours or have major areas of similarity with ours. For instance, Wycliffe IT people often provide informal IT support for other Christian missionary groups (because they share our Christian goals). Wycliffe IT people are also deeply involved in, for example, the Unicode consortium that spans industry, the United Nations, NGOs and governments around the world (who do not share our primary goals) because the automation standards of non-Roman writing systems over which they have great influence are central to so much of our work. It may well not be obvious to outsiders which of those groups are parts of "us" and which are informal co-labourers.

One of Our Distinctive Principles: "We Serve Everyone."

One of several foundational concepts of Wycliffe's founder, William Cameron Townsend, was that the Gospel of Christ spreads most effectively when "we serve everyone." That principle remains central to our beliefs even today.

In most countries in which our people work, members are involved in a number of key activities: language development, literacy and linguistic research in addition to Bible translation. These side products of Bible translation are of great value to the country whose Bible translation is of essential value to the church. On one level we are serving the nation as a whole in a secular capacity, and on another they are serving the church in a technical capacity.