Cameron Townsend

William Cameron Townsend was born on July 9, 1896, in southern California. He grew up in a simple Christian family and was converted as a boy. He studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 1917, at the age of twenty-one, he volunteered to go to Guatemala to sell Spanish Bibles in the countryside. He left college before graduating, and he set out with a few books and a strong determination to be useful.

He found that the people of the highlands in Guatemala spoke languages that he could not understand. Most of them were Indians who spoke the Cakchiquel language and had little Spanish. One day, an old Cakchiquel man asked him a question that changed his life. If your God is so great, he said, why can't He speak my language? Townsend had no answer. He decided that every people should have the Bible in their own tongue.

He settled among the Cakchiquel and gave himself to learning their language. It took him years, and he lived with the people and shared their poverty. He married Elvira Malmstrom, a missionary, in 1919, and she worked with him. By 1929 he had finished a translation of the New Testament into Cakchiquel. It was a landmark work and showed what a patient outsider could do. He also saw that many languages in the world had never been written down, and he began to think of a way to train others.

In 1934 he opened a small summer school in Arkansas to teach linguistics to young people who wanted to translate the Bible. It was called Camp Wycliffe, after John Wycliffe, the first translator of the English Bible. There were only two students at first. From it grew the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and in 1942 the Wycliffe Bible Translators. The two organizations worked side by side, with one dealing with the scientific work of language study and the other with the missionary side. He thought that translators should work wherever there were people with no Scripture.

He took a large view of the task. He traveled in Mexico, Peru, Colombia and other countries, and he won the trust of presidents and officials. In Mexico he formed a lasting friendship with President Lázaro Cárdenas, who admired his work. In Peru he started a jungle base and found that the translators needed a way to reach remote villages. In 1948 he helped to start a flying service, the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, to carry translators and their supplies into the interior. Over the years, thousands of translators went out, and the New Testament was given to hundreds of peoples.

His approach was criticized. Some accused the organization of working too closely with governments, and others thought that its low-key public image hid its religious purpose. In the 1970s he faced strong attacks in several Latin American countries. He was also a man who could be impatient, and he pressed his coworkers hard. He admitted some mistakes and kept going.

His first wife died in 1944, and in 1946 he married Elaine Mielke, who became his partner for the rest of his life. He died on April 23, 1982, in North Carolina, at the age of eighty-five. Today, Wycliffe and its partners have helped to bring the Scriptures to many hundreds of language groups. His life shows what can happen when a single question from an old man is taken seriously.