Why Vision 2025?

By Max Sahl | Wycliffe Today Autumn 2025 |

Have you set yourself any New Year’s resolutions for this year? What do they look like? While short-term goals are helpful, long-term goals are also important for organisations like Wycliffe as we move forward and seek God’s will for the future.

Vision 2025 was adopted by Wycliffe Bible Translators International Global (now known as Wycliffe Global Alliance) and SIL International in 1999. It was estimated that it would take over 150 years to start a Bible translation project for every language group that needs Scripture. The vision was borne from a desire to see the work accelerated so that, by the year 2025, no language group would still be waiting. 

I was working with SIL in Papua New Guinea when Vision 2025 was first proposed in 1999 and remember feeling a mixture of excitement and disbelief. Could this really be possible?

Some of the considerations that Wycliffe and its partners have kept in mind throughout the years leading up to 2025 have been the following:

• > a changing landscape of missiology and the Church’s commitment to it
• > establishing new partnership opportunities 
• > growing local involvement and ownership of translation projects
• > the impact of globalisation
• > opportunities and challenges of AI

So, how are we faring? How close are we to the realisation of Vision 2025? While it is true that ‘nothing is impossible with God’ (Matthew 19:26) the reality is that there are still 985 languages without any Scripture that need a translation of God’s Word to begin. This edition of Wycliffe Today takes a look at how far we have come and the exciting new opportunities that are enabling incredible progress towards seeing God’s Word translated into every language that needs it. 

Featured photo: Wycliffe Global Alliance leaders at a recent conference in South Africa. Photo by Jennifer Pillinger.