Wycliffe USA headquarters, Orlando, Florida

By -


Joyce and I spent a few days at the headquarters of Wycliffe USA in Orlando, Florida, last week. You might not know that Wycliffe is an "organization of organizations," under the umbrella of the Wycliffe Global Alliance. We are members of Wycliffe USA, and that is the organization that sends us to Papua New Guinea, but other countries have their own Wycliffe sending organizations: Wycliffe UK, Wycliffe Finland, Wycliffe Germany, etc. In addition, Wycliffe works with other partner organizations, such as Faith Comes By Hearing and OneStory.

With Bob Creson, President of Wycliffe USA
This visit to Orlando was part of the orientation to the new roles we'll be taking when we return to Papua New Guinea in a couple of weeks. I'll be the Director of Language Services for Papua New Guinea, supervising a team of coordinators in domains such as Linguistics, Translation, Arts, Anthropology, Language Survey, Training, Web Publication, and Archiving. I'll also be overseeing our developing partnerships with Papua New Guinea's universities. It's a tremendous responsibility, and I'm grateful for the amazing, talented team that I'll get to work with. Joyce's new role is the Chief Member Communication Consultant. This will include checking and editing written communication that goes out from our colleagues and officially from the PNG Branch itself, as well as training others in the checking and editing standards.

In order to understand Wycliffe's organizational structure, Joyce and I, along with three other colleagues who are stepping into directorate roles in PNG, met with people in the various offices in Orlando: Finance, Communication, Leadership Development, IT, Personnel and Recruiting, and others. It was a great opportunity to see how the home office works, and also to share stories of what is happening in PNG. As we learn our new roles, it will be a big help to know some of the people we may be corresponding with via email to find answers to questions that arise on the field.

Here's an interesting fact we learned in some of our discussions: Wycliffe's work in Bible translation around the world is supported financially by about 350,000 Americans. This seems like a large number, when you think about all of the other opportunities for giving that Americans see every day. But it's a small number compared to the possibly 100,000,000 Americans who are evangelical Christians.

To see a glimpse of how Bible translation is connected to--and must precede--other areas of social justice, take a look at this 6 1/2-minute video from Wycliffe.

Comments

Post a Comment

Most popular posts

Making the most of every opportunity

By -
Image
 Spring semester at GIAL has a slightly more relaxed pace for me than the fall. My teaching load includes a number of distance-based classes, individualized directed studies with students, and supervising master's students as they write their theses. I don't have daily classroom teaching and preparation. This gives me time to focus on other important tasks, such as research, writing, speaking, and school committees. This month I was honored to be invited to Simpson University, in Redding, California, to spend time with several classes. Over just a couple of days, I spoke to four different classes. In those presentations, we looked at poetry by Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpts from Shusako Endo's novel Silence , and ideas gleaned from Japanese American artist Makoto Fujimura. Those passages and concepts framed our story of working in Papua New Guinea for over 12 years, and the bigger picture of music and arts in missions. We pray that some of those stude...
Read more

The power of providing food: Researching the world's culinary arts

By -
Image
Photo by Lou Stejskal This semester I’ve been working with our first World Arts student who’s writing a master’s thesis. Previous graduates have opted for the comprehensive exam option. Increasing the department’s capacity to mentor students through thesis writing is one of the reasons I was brought onto the faculty a couple of years ago. The faculty at that time were overloaded with teaching and administrative duties and couldn’t have taken on thesis supervision. This thesis is the first of four that I am currently working with, covering a range of fascinating topics and innovative, practical research. What is a World Arts thesis about? The one I’ve been spending time with this past week is a very interesting look at culinary arts and cooking in West African epic traditions. The student noted in her West African studies that a widespread epic story includes a number of key moments of cooking and eating. Scholarly study of this epic tends to focus on the ...
Read more

Meeting the Prime Minister

By -
Image
Yesterday was (going to be) an exciting day. Peter O'Neill, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, was visiting the Eastern Highlands Province, and as part of his visit he was planning to stop at our airstrip! All of us in the directorate planned to go out and meet him. We went to the airstrip at 8 a.m. to await the Prime Minister's arrival. By 10 a.m., he had not left Port Moresby yet. And by noon, he had decided not to stop at our airstrip after all. Here is (almost) the picture I expected to be posting to the blog, of me shaking hands with the Prime Minister: Somewhat disappointing, but it was still an interesting way to spend a Friday. Always nice to get out of the office. Waiting for the PM, with Eastern Highlands Province Governor Julie Soso
Read more