At our offices in Buckinghamshire, we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Maybe not so much a cloud as a camp – each of the buildings here is named after a pioneer mission worker. As we plan to move to new offices, we want to remember some of the people who are named on our buildings and built our organisation.
It was early 1921 and William Cameron Townsend, who would later found Wycliffe, had been working with the Cakchiquel people of Guatemala for several years. He was planning a Cakchichel Bible Conference and invited a speaker from the US who he’d been told was a ‘lively’ evangelist:
‘Once Leonard Legters arrived for the conference, Cam decided the word lively was an understatement! L. L., as everyone called Leonard Legters, was a fireball of activity. He preached day and night, using anything he could get his hands on to illustrate his sermons. The only thing he complained about was having to stand still while his words were translated first into Spanish by Cam and then into Cakchiquel from the Spanish.’ (From Cameron Townsend: Good news in every language by Janet and Geoff Benge)
Sixty people, including a tribal leader, chose to follow Jesus that week, but Legters had a glimpse of how fantastic it would be for the people to hear a preacher in their own language. He saw more of the need in Guatemala and returned to the US promising to return the following year and to tell others about what he’d seen.
LL and his wife Edna, with Townsend
In 1933, when visiting the Townsends in California, Legters convinced Cam that there was a need in Mexico too, ‘at least 50 languages!’ On November 11th that year, the two men stood on the border of Mexico and prayed, until God answered by opening the door for them there.
Legters set up and ran the Pioneer Missionary Agency to support the growing work, especially as Townsend began running Wycliffe summer school in the US to teach linguistics for Bible translation work. In 1942, this became Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International (Wycliffe’s linguistic partner).
But even outside of his involvement with Wycliffe, Legters had worked phenomenally hard for God, serving Native American peoples in the southern USA as well as being a prominent speaker and writer. As we thank God for the work he did through Legters’ life, we continue to look ahead, to the 1,967 people groups still waiting for God’s word in their language. Find out what you can do to help.
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