Until Ruth Ann Price came along, the
only missionaries supported by the UB Missions Department were
the ones
serving on UB fields.
She talked with the Missions Board about her upcoming work with
Wycliffe Bible Translators, and asked them to consider having some
link with her, even though she wouldn’t be serving on a UB
field. The Board responded by providing 100% of her support for
ten years.
So Ruth Ann Price was the first partial-support missionary. Now
there are about 20 of them. And seven of them serve with Wycliffe.
Ruth Ann Price grew up in United Brethren parsonages as the daughter
of Rev. Homer and Amanda Price (one of her brothers is the late
Rev. Marvin Price). Ruth Ann graduated from Huntington College
in 1965. Four years later, when she was teaching school in Lake
Havasu City, AZ, she joined Wycliffe. Nearly 30 years later, she’s
still with them (actually, with the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
or SIL, the name for Wycliffe’s field work).
Ruth Ann’s early mission years were spent in Mexico, followed
by a couple years at the Dallas training center when it was just
starting. In 1981, she left for Manila, Philippines, serving there
until 1992 (with two years in the States during the late 1980s
to get her Masters in Management). In 1992, Ruth Ann returned to
Dallas, where she now holds the title of International Management
Training Coordinator.
"I’m not a typical missionary," she says. "When
people ask me what I do and I say, ‘Management training,’ they
say, ‘What? Why do missionaries need management training?’"
Ruth Ann becomes energized when she talks about management issues.
She loves to develop and conduct workshops which build management
skills, and to help people see new ways to accomplish their work
by applying management techniques and principles. She leads training
in Dallas, consults via email with Wycliffe people around the world,
and conducts on-field training.
For instance, Ruth Ann has done a lot of training in Nairobi,
Kenya, with various groups which operate throughout Africa. Last
year, she did a workshop in the Philippines for representatives
from about eight countries—Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South
Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other places. In January, she’ll
return to South Asia.
"So I get to influence the work in a number of places," Ruth
Ann says.
Recently, she stopped in Huntington and talked about Wycliffe’s
work and her own role within the organization.
How would you characterize the work of Wycliffe Bible Translators?
We don’t see ourselves as a general mission, but as a mission
with a specific task. We stay focused on our part of the Great
Commission—Bible translation and use of the Scriptures.
Specifically, we address the needs of minority language groups.
Even in the world of science and linguistics, that is a pretty
narrow focus. Literacy work is part of that. Why produce a book
when you don’t have any readers? There are a lot of things
we might need to do—learn the language, put it in a written
form, help establish reading as a value in the culture, and teach
them to read, so that when the New Testament is done, the people
know how to read.
We don’t deal primarily with major language groups; other
missions are involved in that, and we help them with consultants,
workshops, and anything else we can do. In some places there never
will be a written Bible you hold in your hands. It may be on tape
or video.
Why wouldn’t there be a written Bible?
For instance, where it’s against the law to distribute Scriptures,
or where there’s a cultural taboo about paper or words on
paper. In places like that, we must look at creative ways to reach
the people, and it may involve a non-written form. We also have
people doing translation with sign language. That’s a new
frontier. There are a number of different kinds of sign languages
in the world.
We’re thinking in terms of completing the task in a lot of
places. In some countries, like Ecuador and Bolivia, we’ve
phased out our work. We’re doing studies now to see how the
work is continuing among the indigenous people.
So Wycliffe’s ultimate goal is to disband? Wouldn’t
that be nice.
Organizations don’t do that. Once translation is done, the
temptation would be to branch into something else in that country.
I know. Change is painful. It’s difficult getting people to
think of going someplace other than where they’ve been, where
they raised their children, where their life work has been centered.
According to much current management literature, many companies
that have bought smaller companies and diversified haven’t
done well. They lost focus trying to go in too many directions.
It’s too easy to lose the cutting edge.
Wycliffe is now one of the older missions. The temptation is to
try doing too many things, to change our focus.
We also need to stay focused on nationalizing our work. Rather
than doing what nationals could do themselves, help them develop
their own "kit of tools." For instance, we don’t
focus on evangelism, because the national Christians can do it
better, more aggressively, and more completely. We would rather
focus on getting them the Word so they can use it in evangelism,
discipleship, and church growth.
But lest I give the impression that we do an excellent job with
all of this—we’ve made our mistakes. But it can be done.
People have proven that they can go in, do the work of translation,
finish, leave, and go to another place. The church can thrive without
us. But it’s a big challenge to keep that kind of focus.
What is your role?
I’m the International Management Training Coordinator for
SIL International, the field work we do. My job is to help them
with tools—training, consulting, and materials—for completing
the job in a certain country. One way we do that is to provide
managers. We recruit people with management specialties in any
field, and provide training to help them make the transition into
cross-cultural mission management. In Dallas, we do a year-round
course mostly for new support workers who come with a management
background and will be assigned to a management roll.
What needs to be managed?
For example, in the Philippines we work in 70 or 80 languages.
That requires an infrastructure of offices, administrative services,
computer services, flight coordination, personnel resources, and
educators. Some business infrastructure is needed to handle people’s
accounts, finances, transferring funds to the field, etc.
Another management task is helping translators look at their projects
from beginning to end as a management process, or a number of processes.
If they’re just entering a language and want to know how long
it will take them to finish, we have processes in place to help
them work on a strategic plan so they know the pieces required
to get the whole task done. This is different in each country,
and often different in each language group.
Right now, one management issue is helping fields look at phasing
out—what will it take to finish the task there, and how many
people will be needed for certain periods of the work? When you’re
starting out as a group of translators and support people, you
have different needs than when you’re finishing. Currently,
we’re looking at finishing in the Philippines. We have greater
needs on the computer and printing end of things, because we have
more testaments translated which need to be produced.
As a management training department, we do skill-building workshops
on the field, sometimes a week or two in length. We’re developing
a skill-building program for persons moving into management roles.
Many of our managers went to the field to be translators, not managers,
so we’re trying to help the translator who has been pulled
out of a language work to manage or direct field work.
We have a number of creative ways to help. One we call the Management
Coaching Program, where we send a management coach to the field
to come alongside and encourage and teach them right on the job.
Since we don’t have enough consultants, one of the big initiatives
in recent years has been LinguaLinks, a way to provide consultant
help through computers. If you ask a certain question, you get
certain responses back—"Have you tried this?" We’d
also like to provide interactive help for managers online.
Do management principles translate well into other cultures?
Recently, we’ve been doing a lot of exploration in how to
get nationals to the level where they can manage their own projects.
But management is pretty well defined as a western practice. How
do we help them leap the cultural gap and talk about a culturally
appropriate management process of accountability and inventories
of books and developing training materials? How do we help them
set up systems that work in their own culture?
We can’t just teach them Situational Leadership or how to
do Management Grid or Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People. It just isn’t necessarily cross-culturally appropriate.
So we have to look at the cultural determiners for accomplishing
these things—how they would be accomplished naturally through
their own cultural system.
Accountability, for example, is an issue everywhere, including
in our own culture. In some kinship systems, if you have access
to money—it doesn’t matter whether it’s your money
or somebody else’s—and your cousin has a need, it’s
required in that kinship system that you meet his need. I understand
the need, but I also understand the tension from outside donors
who want their money used in certain ways.
In some places, it means you don’t put one person in charge.
You don’t want a "head man" who has control of everything,
because there’s too much pressure on him and you set him up
for failure—handling too much money and too many people responsibilities.
Last year, I did a pilot project in Africa for national leaders
who have been working with translators and literacy workers. It
dealt with taking processes which help with accountability and
people management and planning, and translating those processes
into their own African cultural base. We "Africanized" what
I had been teaching in a Western format, translated it into French,
and did a pilot project to help them manage large literacy projects.
The goal is to help them become independent of missionaries.
Every culture has ways to link people and talk, to hold people
accountable, to get people to do what needs to be done. We just
have to figure out how they do it and help them develop new skills.
[ TOP ]
Is Wycliffe working in the countries of the former Soviet Union?
Yes, but in most places, we are facilitators and trainers, rather
than actual translators. Many people in those countries hold higher
education degrees and are experts in language, so it’s a matter
of sharing the vision for getting Bible translation done in their
own languages. Once they catch that vision, they give themselves
to it. Wycliffe people will probably never do translation, but
will be consultants and facilitators.
The same thing is happening even in Africa, where you’ll
find some highly educated, seminary-trained people. That’s
harder to do in places where education is not at a high level.
How is missions affected by the ever-widening technological
gap between the United States and other countries?
The gap is very wide. When I entered missions 30 years ago, we
had much more of an agrarian society. We were not linked globally.
Now, many US homes have computers, along with various electronic
gadgets we’ve incorporated into our lives as "necessities." The
more that increases, the wider the gap between the countries of
the First and Third worlds.
That can be a big adjustment for new missionaries who find themselves
living in a country where such conveniences and gadgets aren’t
part of everyday life. If you pay a certain amount of money, you
can get anything done in the United States. That doesn’t happen
in most Third World countries. We have become more widely removed
from the world mainstream.
A Wycliffe translator may spend 15 years on a single language.
But most mission groups are having trouble finding career missionaries;
the trend is toward short-term service. Is that affecting Wycliffe?
Any way you cut it, Bible translation is a long-term program requiring
a certain number of people committed to the long-term. But when
Generation Xers and Baby Busters go to the field in short-term
programs and see what it’s like and the results of investing
their lives, they often become long-term committed.
It’s not that they don’t want to be long-term committed;
it’s that they don’t have anything big enough to commit
themselves to. They’re as willing to invest their lives in
worthwhile kingdom-building as anyone else. At least that’s
what we’re discovering.
If somebody works in a language for years and then leaves,
there’s probably a phenomenal learning curve for the new
guy.
That’s right. You don’t want to lose those long-term
people. And you can’t just plug people in anywhere.
One strategy is to get scholars involved in seeing what can be
done on a mission field. We call it the Graduate Intern Program
(GRIP). These scholars go to the field to help a linguist do a
particular project related to that language. One guy is doing a
grammar write-up for a language; he took the language data and
helped write it up. Many conclusions come from that grammar write-up
when the translator sees everything in one place. This helps short-termers
make a contribution and may help them make long-term commitments.
I think the Christian church public has tended to think of missions
in a fairly narrow way—medical work, education, relief work.
If we can help broaden people’s perspective about what missions
is, they might see how some of their natural abilities and training
can be used.
