Out of focus

This week has seen Kingsley College hold its biannual spiritual focus week, the emphasis of which was missions. We'll be hosting a number of guest speakers from different mission agencies, including OMF, Pioneers, Interserve, and Wycliffe. It's great to hear about what God is doing throughout the world through people who humbly serve Him. A number of Wycliffe personnel attend my church, so I often get to hear about Wycliffe and its work of Bible translation. In January 2005, I spent 3 weeks in the Phillipines working voluntarily for SIL, an affiliated organisation of Wycliffe. See http://manilasil2005.spaces.live.com/ for more information on this adventure.

To this day, Wycliffe's work remains close to my heart. As a token gesture, I support a Wycliffe missionary couple working in Russia. As we learnt when attempting a basic translation exercise during the Tuesday morning session, Bible translation is a difficult and challenging task, particularly when done without translation aids such as lexicons, language software, or golden tablets, magic peep stones and a hat. The work of Bible translation is important and indeed necessary, because a people group cannot be considered to have been truly reached with the gospel until they have the Bible available to them in their heart language. Wycliffe, and indeed any other mission organisation can always use more support. John Wesley once said that the world was his parish, and it can be the same for us too. Why not consider finding out more about supporting mission work in some way?