Blame it on John Wycliffe

More than a century before Martin Luther, or John Calvin, or King Henry VIII, there was John Wycliffe. That makes him a Catholic, of course.

However, due to his efforts to translate the Bible into the vernacular and his opposition to papal authority influencing secular rulers, many see John Wycliffe as as the "Morning Star of the Protestant Reformation."

His influence didn't end with the beginning of that great schism in Christianity, though. Early in the 20th century, inspired by the opportunity to make the Bible available to the first nations of Central America in their own language rather than Spanish, William Cameron Townsend founded an organization dedicated to translating the Bible into every language of the world, and named it "Wycliffe Bible Translators" after John Wycliffe. You can learn more about them at http://www.wycliffe.ca/aboutus/history_aboutus.html.

Roughly 20 years later, my parents, who had met at Houghton College, a Protestant Christian college in south-western New York state, joined Wycliffe Bible Translators and, after further post-degree training, sought out a cultural/linguistic group of people who didn't yet have the Bible in their own language, and were willing to ask for it.

So it was that my brother James and I grew up in south-western Alberta, Canada, amid the Stoney Nakoda first nation, who requested my parents come, learn their language, and translate the Bible into it.

As you might imagine, that led to a rather unique upbringing for us. It also led to our going to school variously in Morley, the townsite at the centre of the Stoney reserve; Exshaw, a small town with a cement mining economy about 30 minutes' drive east of Banff National Park; Strathcona-Tweedsmuir, a school just south of Calgary; Springbank, a western suburb of Calgary; Banff Composite (now Community) High School in the Banff Townsite in Banff National Park; and finally the University of Calgary for our first (and so far my only) degrees.

This whole time, my parents were living out a mission that had more twists and turns than the road to the Mt. Norquay ski resort in Banff. And James and I were growing up in a home where our Christian faith was so pervasive that we just took it for granted - until we arrived at university. We were also attending a St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Banff, a fine church with a congregation that was a tiny fraction of the Sunday attendance thanks to the large number of tourists who attended each week.

Obviously, the foregoing paragraphs hint at many potential books' worth of content, and I'll often visit various episodes during this time frame from 1965 to 1986, but this blog, and any book that it may become, is not first and foremost about my parents, brother or me. It's about my experience of the Roman Catholic Church as the previously Protestant son of these two Wycliffe missionaries.

(Copyright (c) 2011, Reg Harbeck, all rights reserved)