Our Founder

Wycliffe's founder, Cameron Townsend, had a pretty incredible story and his legacy is really actively living on still. He was just 21 years old in the early 1900's when he first went around selling Spanish Bibles in Guatemala. There he realized that many of the native people could not read these because they didn't speak Spanish! One man asked him, "If your god is so great, why can't he speak my language?" That question started his translation work on a Bible in the Cakchiquel language. In ten years he and his wife completed the New Testament translation! This is remarkable time, even by today's standards, and it was done without computers or modern technology. He went on to begin training others to translate for other people groups.
In 1942, Wycliffe was founded with the goal of putting God's Word in the language of every person's heart-the language you dream in, the language you think in, the language you pray in, the language you worship in.