Friday, April 24, 2026

It is the 24th of April 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

 

It was on this, the 24th of April in 1982, when Cameron Townsend died in Waxhaw, North Carolina- you may not have heard of him before- but Billy Graham said of him that “no man in this century has advanced the cause of Christian missions as much as Cameron Townsend”. His life is not without controversy, but his founding of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service certainly helps flesh out Graham’s claim about the man.

 

He was born in Riverside County, that’s here in Southern California, in 1896- the son of a poor tenant farmer. He would attend Santa Ana High School and then Occidental College in Los Angeles. It was at Occidental that he joined the Student Volunteer Movement- a missions group that formed out of Moody’s Mt Hermon School and the YMCA in the 1880s. Townsend heard John R. Mott when he came to the school and heeded his call to “evangelize the world in this generation”. However, the year was 1916, and Cam had joined the National Guard and was ready to ship off to France. He asked the military for a discharge and was surprised when his CO told him that he would be better off as a missionary than fighting Germans.

 

Given his discharge papers, he joined the Bible House of Los Angeles and was sent to Guatemala to distribute Spanish Bibles. His mission would be forever changed when he was confronted by a man there whose indigenous language- Cakchiquel- had no written alphabet and thus no Bible. The man asked Cam, “If your God is so smart, why can’t he speak my language”? Townsend canceled his return trip and would spend the next 15 years in Guatemala studying the language with a local, Francisco Diaz, who assisted him in both translation and ministry. Diaz would, unfortunately, die in 1919, but Townsend would marry Elvira Malmstrom, a stenographer for local missionaries, and the two would complete the Cakchiquel New Testament in 1929.

 

In 1933, he would attempt to move into Mexico but was stopped as missionaries- especially Protestant missionaries- were forbidden in the country. This would lead him, through his connections with the government, to form the Summer Institute of Linguistics. This was not billed as a missions group, but as state-sponsored translators- identifying indigenous languages and creating dictionaries and grammars. Part of Townsend’s success lay in his ability to work with governments in Central and South America. His connections with Nelson Rockefeller, who was the Assistant Secretary of State, and the CIA, made him an unfortunate pawn in later Cold War dealings with Latin American countries.

 

But his key contribution, beyond translation, was his idea that missionaries shouldn’t target continents and nations as such, but rather “ethnos”- ethnic linguistic groups. This, and his evangelical belief in the power of Scripture, led to the development of Camp Wycliffe in Sulfur Springs, Arkansas- (Wycliffe, as in John Wycliffe, the man behind the first translation of the Bible into English). The translation camp in a small farmhouse would, by the late 1940s, be incorporated into the Wycliffe Bible Translators- today the largest Bible translation organization in the world. In 1948, he introduced the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service- a group of linguists, missionaries, and pilots who helped get into unreached areas in the Latin American rainforest. His work with local peoples and governments made him a useful tool for American oil companies and the CIA- a trade-off that highlights the sometimes tenuous relationship between evangelization and the geopolitics of empire.

 

But his legacy, from the first Bible in Cakchiquel to the present, is the emphasis on language translation- of some 7500 plus languages on the planet, some 5000 didn’t have scripture as late as 1999- as of last year, there are only about 500 languages left without scripture.

 

Townsend would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1981 for his work in linguistics and died the following year, on the 24th of April in 1982. His tombstone in North Carolina reads, “Dear Ones: by love serve one another. Finish the task. Translate the Scriptures into every language. — Uncle Cam”- Born in 1896, Cameron Townsend was 85 years old.

 

 

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and a short passage from Exodus 4 as we head into Good Shepherd Sunday:

18 Then Moses went back to Jethro his father-in-law and said to him, “Let me return to my own people in Egypt to see if any of them are still alive.”

Jethro said, “Go, and I wish you well.”

19 Now the Lord had said to Moses in Midian, “Go back to Egypt, for all those who wanted to kill you are dead.” 20 So Moses took his wife and sons, put them on a donkey and started back to Egypt. And he took the staff of God in his hand.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 24th of April 2026, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who notes that “Occidental” is the opposite of “Oriental” (it’s Latin for sunset and sunrise)- He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who said “Santa Ana” like a tourist… it’s SanTana- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.