#04: The Power of a Big Vision: Dr. Michel Kenmogne

But I'd like to begin and dive in with Vision 2025, a real foundational organizing vision for the movement over a significant generation.

I'd like you to share a bit of your reflections on that and what you've seen as some of the special fruit from God's leading us together in that direction.

Well, thank you.

Thank you very much, Woody.

And that's really a question because I remember 1999.

I was just four years into this ministry.

I was not even in any leadership position at Capital.

I was just a junior staff just trying to find my way into this ministry.

When our leader came back from a conference that was held in Waxhaw, and he came back very excitedly and saying, oh, yeah, Vision 2025.

I was wondering, what is this all about? And it turns out that really at that conference in 1999, the leaders of SIL and Wycliffe International, as the organizations were called back then, they looked at the state of Bible translation.

and they realized that it would take till the year two thousand one hundred and fifty for the last people group on earth to have access to god's word if translation was to continue at the prevailing pace And everybody was shocked and just said, this is unacceptable.

And that is when the leaders kind of gathered and said, let us do something.

Let us do whatever is possible to see that by the year 2025, there would be a translation program in progress in any language group that needs one.

And that was the commitment of the group that gathered in Waxhaw in that year 1999.

And you know, really with such a vision, I've realized in retrospect As God's word says that where there is no vision, the people perish.

Because I realized that this vision has gone a long way to shape my personal trajectory and service in Bible translation for the past 25 years.

And it has also really impacted the whole Bible translation movement in significant ways.

Just to give you... a glimpse in my personal journey because I consider myself a true product of Vision 2025, so to say, because my first leadership role, which was a language programs manager, happened in the year 2000, just the following year after Vision 2025.

And when I took on that responsibility and starting to say, how do I go about managing translation programs and so on, I realized that Vision 2025 was inviting us not just to work in the traditional ways that we had known, but Vision 2025 was challenging us to Consider creative ways to do the same ministry, innovative approaches, partnerships, the role of the local church, and so on and so forth.

And then I started to ask myself, so what holds me from really trying any new strategy that could enable us to do it better and even faster? And that is when I started to imagine how could the church be part of the translation program, not just be at the receiving end of the process, but also be part of the process as a full participant.

I started to ask myself those questions.

And that led me to say, hey, rather than just planning a project in the office and go to the field to implement it, we could actually mobilize the field mobilize the churches mobilize the communities to be full participants in it and that became the new way for us to do ministry in capital and just so many things that we thought about back then with the impetus with the stimulus of vision 2025 Maybe if I were to just tell my own story, I could spend, I could just take the rest of the time on that.

But really what I could say at the global level is that really we are in 2026 and when we look back, we realize that the impact of Vision 2025 has been what nobody could have imagined because Just in 25 years, we have witnessed the greatest acceleration in the Bible translation ministry ever.

with more than 1,400 languages receiving God's word for the first time.

This is unprecedented.