John Chesnut President CEO Wycliffe Bible Translators Illuminations Finishing the Task Financial Finish Line Podcast
Finish Line Podcast Episode 49

John Chesnut, CEO of Wycliffe Bible Translators, on Collaboration and the IllumiNations Impact Alliance

If you have always had easy access to Scripture, it can be difficult to imagine what faith, discipleship, or church planting would look like without God’s Word in a language you truly understand.

As Bible translation reaches the world’s hardest places, how might your prayers, generosity, and participation help more communities encounter Scripture in the language that speaks most deeply to them?


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Meet your guide

John Chesnut, President and CEO of Wycliffe Bible Translators, has spent decades serving the global church through pastoral ministry, missions, Bible translation, and leadership. After seeing firsthand how the absence of understandable Scripture limited evangelism, discipleship, and church planting, John and his family joined Wycliffe and spent nine years serving in the Philippines.

John explains how Bible translation has shifted from missionaries spending entire careers translating one language toward growing collaboration with local believers, national churches, and organizations such as Jesus Film, Faith Comes By Hearing, Finishing the Task, and the illumiNations movement. He describes how shared resources, technology, and open-handed partnerships are accelerating translation while preserving the importance of accuracy and local ownership.

The conversation also highlights major remaining challenges, including restricted countries, remote communities, and the roughly 70 million Deaf people worldwide who need access to Scripture in sign languages. By the end, you may see Bible translation as foundational Great Commission work and recognize meaningful ways your resources can help make God’s Word accessible.

What you’ll gain

  • Why understandable Scripture is foundational to church planting
  • How local believers are transforming the Bible translation movement
  • Why ministry collaboration is accelerating global translation efforts
  • What barriers still prevent communities from accessing God’s Word
  • Why Deaf communities remain a major Bible translation frontier
  • How generosity can help Scripture reach the hardest places

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Quotes to Remember

  • “This God of yours, if He is so big, why doesn’t He speak our language?”
  • “It used to be common for a New Testament translation to take the life career of a missionary family.”
  • “Now today, more and more translation is being carried out by people from these communities.”
  • “God is bringing together different partners to carry out His work in ways I don’t know if we’ve ever seen in the history of the church.”
  • “What would it look like for the Great Commission to be fulfilled in our lifetime?”
  • “We’ve seen collectively more resources come in working in an open handed posture in that way than what we could have done individually, by far.”
  • “The unreached people groups of the world are unreached for a reason. If it were easy, they would be reached. But those that are unreached are literally at the ends of the earth.”
  • “Where outsiders are not allowed in, God is raising up people from within these communities.”

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