Scott Ross didn’t know why he was in seminary at first. Now, nearly 40 years later, he knows.
Ross recounts often brushing off his grandmother’s encouragement to become a pastor as he pondered a life in law enforcement instead. But the Californian now looks back on multiple decades as a pastor with gratitude, and with zeal toward the current task at hand.
To make God’s word available in every tongue.
“My grandma was right,” Ross said.
“Since college, I have loved Scripture,” Ross said. “I literally would find myself at times just falling out of my chair onto my knees, just worshiping God because of how amazing it was and how it ties together... it’s miraculous.”
Nearly 15 years of pastoring church plants honed a further love for the Bible and its transformative power for Ross.
A venture into the nonprofit side of parachurch ministry followed that heart, eventually leading him to a leadership role with the world’s most prolific Bible translation organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators.
At the top of the priority is connecting U.S. churches in on the global translation effort.
“The church in the U.S. has enormous resources, and I’m not just talking about money,” Ross said. “We have prayer, we have people who God is calling to get involved in Bible translation, and we do have resources, funding resources that we can support the work that’s going on.”
A large part of the work, according to Ross, is convincing pastors and other church leaders that Bible translation is not something that just happens “over there.”
Initiatives like Adopt-a-Verse allow churches to not only support the translation of Scripture to unreached peoples, but also interact with the work in a tangible way and see the impact being made.
The average verse costs an estimated $35 to translate, a number that includes the training, tech, and tools required. Local churches can select a certain passage or Bible book to “adopt”, allowing families and individuals to take ownership in the work.
The initiative has been a hit, Ross says, with more churches joining in every month.
“It’s awareness of the issue; it’s investment – they put skin in the game. They engage through prayer, and then they experience the impact,” Ross explained.
“It’s just an amazing way to help the people in the church connect with what’s happening on the other side of the world. Any church can do it.”
In 1999, Wycliffe launched an ambitious initiative titled “Vision 2025”, setting the goal of starting Scripture translation in every language in the world. The organization is just over 500 short as of today.
The inability to reach the aspiration isn’t just that the final languages remaining are the most difficult people groups to reach, but also that the initial estimate of languages needing translation when Vision 2025 was announced was later increased by nearly 2,000.
If such a fact stopped those working to translate God’s Word in their tracks with disappointment, it would be hard to blame them. But Ross says the opposite is true.
“Most of [the people in Bible translation] are so motivated because they’ve seen what God’s done over the last 25 years,” Ross said. “We’re saying, ‘All right, God, we’ve seen you do something that we could never have imagined, and so, what are you going to do now?’ In the space of reaching the least and the last, the most unreached, there’s a lot of faith.”
So, the work continues each day. As it happens, Ross will keep imploring the local body of Christ across the U.S. to play a part.
“We just continue to discover that God knows a whole lot more than we do,” Ross said. “God will use any of us. All he wants is our ‘yes’. And as we say yes, he just does really cool stuff.”
To find out more about Wycliffe or learn how to get involved, click here.