The Summer Institute of Linguistics and Indigenous Movements

Abstract

To plantation owners of El Salvador's western coffee districts, a January night in 1932 must have seemed like end of world. With volcanos in eruption, Pipil Indian peasants rose up against their masters. town of Juayua, Reverend A. Roy MacNaught of Central American Mission awoke to a great banging noise. Down street a mob was battering down door of telegraph office. In morning when I looked out, wrote Reverend MacNaught (1932), the red flag was flying from town hall; we were under communistic rule for first time. Several years later another member of Central American Mission wrote about El Salvador uprising in an autobiographical novel. To dramatize his Mayan Bible translation, this Protestant scribe invented a parallel revolt across border in Guatemala near his own mission stations. The novel's Mayan Evangelist makes supreme sacrifice to stop a Bolshevik revolution. You will have land, schools, freedom if you follow God's word and obey government, he tells angry plantation workers. The Russian instigator shoots evangelist; Mayan rebels fall to their knees before a dying Christ. The author of this scene, William Cameron Townsend (1936), was organizing a new mission to overcome linguistic and political barriers to evangelical expansion. We know it today as two organizations whose membership is identical: Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT),1 which raises funds and recruits in United States, British Commonwealth, and Europe; and Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which operates under contract to governments in Latin America, Africa, and along East Asian rim. SIL/WBT strategy has become something of a classic in evangelical circles. To translate New Testament into pre-literate languages, teach