Managing the Work of World Missions

An interview with Ruth Ann Price about her work with Wycliffe

Steve Dennie

January 1997

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, Ariz., 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.

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.