In the Company of Travellers: S2E4 Transcript / Discernment

Guest: Ruth Smith-Sutherland, Director, Wycliffe Caribbean. Hosts: Jo Johnson and Hannes Wiesmann.

Hannes Wiesmann:

Welcome to In The Company of Travellers, a podcast of the Wycliffe Global Alliance. I am Hannes Wiesmann. I live in Switzerland and serve as Assistant to the Alliance Executive Director.

Jo Johnson:

And I’m Jo-Johnson. I’m based in England and I serve as Consultant for Prayer Advocacy in the Alliance. Yes, welcome everyone to another new episode. We’ve been talking with leaders from all over the world about their discernment process, personally and corporately. What does it look like? What are some examples that others might gain insight from? Hannes, who is our guest today?

Hannes:

We are speaking today with Ruth Smith-Sutherland. Ruth serves as the director of Wycliffe Caribbean. She is based in Jamaica, and she brings experience in discerning direction for an organization that spans 15 Caribbean nations.

Jo:

So without further ado, here then is our conversation with Ruth Smith Sutherland.

Hannes:

We’re exploring the theme of discernment today. And you, Ruth, have described discernment as the ability to see beyond the obvious. That immediately caught my attention, and I’m eager to hear more about what that means for you. Could you start by sharing a moment from your own life, personal or professional, where discernment really mattered?

Ruth Smith-Sutherland:

OK, thank you so much. I go back in my mind to when I assumed the leadership of Wycliffe Caribbean. That was in 2022. I had come from a very, very different background. I came to Bible translation from corporate, and ways of working were a little bit different. And here I was being called upon to take the reins of leadership. And I kind of thought, what direction will this go in? As you know, I have the opportunity of serving in Wycliffe Caribbean. Our head office is in Jamaica, and very often things got focused on the head office. I thought, “Is this the way we want this to continue?” This was where I felt that God might be leading us to focus in another direction.

The Caribbean is a very interesting place. We are thought of sometimes as an entity. We are far from being that. CARICOM has 15 very diverse nations. We have a lot in common historically, but each very assertive with their own identity. In fact, one of the leaders in Wycliffe said to me, ‘Ruth, that sounds to me like a mini UN’. And in some ways, that’s exactly right. So I felt, we’re divided by water. It’s easier for each one of us to go to the United States than to visit each other. In fact, people have said, maybe your conference should be in Miami. I said, what? (laughs)

So that was a challenge, but at the same time, I felt that God may be leading us in a different direction, coming together. Challenging. I didn’t know what that could look like or anything, but beyond these 15 nations separated by water, I just felt that there may be another way, us working together. So that’s the example that comes to mind.

Hannes:

That’s beautiful. What was before that impression that you had that God wants to do something new? Can you tell us a little bit how you came to that understanding?

Ruth:

Wycliffe Caribbean had been focused a lot on mobilization, and a lot of great work was done in that regard, sending persons to the nations. The Caribbean is uniquely suited for this. We’ve sent missionaries to Asia, and you could not tell the difference between the missionary and the people that she was serving. We have missionaries in Ethiopia. Again, one of our girls, she’s home on furlough. You can’t tell the difference between her and the people that she serves. These are two different parts of the world, but this is just the nature of the Caribbean.

So that has worked very well for us, been accepted, blend in, work well, wherever. But the question was being asked, Is there something that could be happening in our region? Jamaica has had the New Testament in our Creole for a good long while, since 2012. And of course, the reception of that had been quite varied. From ‘Why did you all waste all of that money to do that? Is that necessary? And we are all English speakers.’ Two, particular groups saying, ‘Yeah, I hear God speaking to me now’. Jamaica had that experience. But again, because of this new vision, the Caribbean, I wondered whether this could be happening elsewhere. SIL had done surveys 20 years ago. And kind of left in frustration. ‘What are we doing here? Everybody says they speak English.’ And their findings sometimes said something else. But when you approach church leaders, officialdom, and so on, ‘We’re English speakers. What are you talking about?’

But at the same time, I had had the opportunity with my predecessor to travel a little in the Caribbean. I remember going into one television station early one morning. It was a 7 o’clock broadcast. And I read from the Jamaican New Testament. When I came downstairs, there was a group of people waiting for me outside the studio. They were hanging onto every word that I had read. They were thrilled by it. And of course they wanted more. And I’m saying, That’s not even their Creole. But it so fascinated them.

So what happened is that, it may have been now a little later in 2022, when you know how God can orchestrate things, we had a missionary couple home on furlough in Jamaica. The husband Jamaican, the wife U.S. Puerto Rican. They had been in Indonesia, where they had come in contact with Taste of Translation. So they were seconded to us for a year. And this conversation that I’m having with you, we were kind of having with them. The wife said, ‘Well, we’ve done Taste of Translation in Indonesia with very good effect.’ And she said, ‘Maybe we could try this.’ So we started a discussion in our language development division. And that division serves the entire Caribbean because, as I said, we are the head office serving the Caribbean. So the first thing we decided to do was to just talk to people again. This is 20 years after Israel and see what the status might be. Again, the first place that we wrote to was the Cayman Islands. Cayman is still a British protectorate. They have a lot of expats. Half of those expats are Jamaicans, but they come from everywhere—Canada, US, everywhere, because it’s a financial center. So our team leader, who happened to be Canadian, wrote back to us to say just that, ‘We speak English.’ He acknowledged the Jamaican Creole and so on. So that was one of the early responses. So I said, well, seems like nothing has changed.

Then we spoke to somebody in Trinidad. She’s a linguist and had served in Brazil and so on. So she was a missionary as well. And she was so very excited that we were even asking the question. She shared with us … her linguistic research, which showed that Trinidad did have these various ways of speaking that was not English. And that encouraged us.

So we did that with a couple more groups. We did it with St. Vincent and Grenadines, where we have a team. We did it with Barbados, and Barbados is very interesting case. Barbadans like to say they speak the Queen’s English. But we did this thing with them. So, long story short, again God orchestrated it that we were approached by a group who said we too want to find out what’s happening, because they were thinking of Vision 2025. They said we will offer you some funds to bring people together to see how this can work. So we had representatives from all of the islands where we have teams. They came together and they started this discussion. Very, very interesting. And out of it has come an oral Bible translation project, which is a cluster project for the Eastern Caribbean. So not only in the West where Jamaica is, but in the East, we now have Bible translation happening.

Again, how do you see this? You can’t. Because people left in frustration before. But here was God orchestrating it, a new wind of his Spirit, and allowed us to just put our sails up to catch that wind. And something really, really wonderful has been out of that.

And can I tell you, the spillover effect is that these groups meet weekly. So the isolationism where we were these separate people who just happen to be in a thing called Wycliffe. We were now talking weekly, working together.

Jo:

It strikes me as you’ve been talking that there are three qualities that are necessary. Patience, because things were not happening maybe at the speed that you really wanted them to. Perseverance, because at first you didn’t get positive responses. And the ability to listen well. You didn’t go in and tell people what to do. You went in and asked. And all of those three added to the ability for a group or four of you together to discern what needed to happen. Yeah, those are all qualities that not always easy, but they’re all fruit of the spirit, I think. Well, listening maybe not, but patience and perseverance both are.

Ruth:

Because particularly in the Barbados case, I have the privilege of going to that Taste of Translation. And I mean, that was one of easily one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had. In fact, when I was getting ready to go, several people called me up and said, ‘So Ruth, what do you think you are going there to do? They speak the Queen’s English.’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’m just going there to ask the questions and hear what it is that they have to say.’

So the first day we went and we started by just asking regular questions. There is a methodology that we use. We call it village mapping. And what we do is to have people say what language is spoken in various places. Coming out of that conversation, the early part, they said to us, ‘Why we sound different from the rest of you in the Caribbean is our Irish influence.’ That happens to be true, too. And they were really talking about the British side of their heritage. And then coming to the end of closing day into the second day, when we were doing scenarios, I recall one of the scenarios being, what would happen if Prime Minister Mia Mottley came to Sunday lunch or dinner? What language do you think she would be speaking? Again, the tables were divided, some were saying English and so on. We had a board member in the room and he laughed out really loud, because he is friends with her father. And then he spoke. And then the mood in the room changed. Because I don’t know if you’ve seen or heard of her. She’s one of our really powerful prime ministers in the Caribbean. When she goes to the UN, everybody listens. But they then said, ‘I think she would be speaking Bajan.’ And coming out of that particular session, the group spontaneously broke into song. It was in Creole. Now, I can’t speak Bajan, but the equivalent in Jamaican would be, ‘We want, we own something,” is what they were singing. So, (name), who was one of those who had done the survey 20 years before, was in the room. He was seated beside me. And I saw when he took out his handkerchief and dabbed the side of his eye and he was whispering, ‘Yes, Jesus, you can take me now.’ (laughs) He was part of those who felt that work was lost, and was really frustrated at this attempt in the Caribbean that did not seem to work. But here he was hearing with his own ears, people, no prompting from us because … all we were doing is asking questions. Back to what you were saying, Jo. And this was their spontaneous response. And I just knew that this was God and a new move of his Spirit that we had very little to do with, really.

Hannes:

So what do you say were some mindsets maybe that you had that helped you or facilitated that you actually reached out and asked these questions? Because you could also just have looked at the records and the survey results and say, well, they speak the King’s English and that’s that, but you didn’t.

Ruth:

Two things. I’m essentially a Caribbean person. I studied at University of the West Indies. And back when I was there is when people came from all over the Caribbean to our campus at Mona. So I was forever interacting with persons from across the Caribbean. Got to know some of them really well.

Hannes:

And to quickly interrupt. Do you say by this, you had a hunch that the server results officially and to talk about the Queen’s English or the King’s English, that’s not the whole truth? You had a hunch, is that correct?

Ruth:

There you go.

Hannes:

Yeah, mm-hmm. Out of your extended connections and interactions that you have had.

Ruth:

Yes, and I’d also read us a little anecdote that had been written by one of the surveyors who said that, ‘Yes, I got the official response.’ But when I pressed them and asked the church leaders, ‘Do you ever use Creole in church? Do you use it in the announcements?’ And then some pastors would relent and say, ‘Yes. When I really want them to get it, I speak in Creole.’ And the surveyor said, he didn’t say it, but he thought it: ‘So when it is that you don’t want them to get it?’

So I knew that there was a place for this Creole. When you want people to get it, you say it in Creole.

Hannes:

Yeah, yeah. I’m assuming in all this process, you had some external critics, people who said, ‘Well, Ruth …’, so tell us a little bit about those.

Ruth:

I told you that we’ve had the New Testament for a while. So Jamaica was pace-setting with this. Now, I’m a teacher by profession and a teacher of English. I am the least likely person you would expect to be pursuing Creole. So we still have some of those recordings up on YouTube, of the responses when the Jamaican New Testament came out. ‘You’re wasting money. You are also trying to keep back people’s children. They must learn English. What are you doing?’ They don’t call it a language, because it’s what’s seen as broken English.

So we’ve had a lot of pushback. But thank God, the majority of the population, those who really are in touch with what is going on, they are the ones who have pushed this internationally. These are our athletes. You know, there are some who, when they are being interviewed, if you don’t understand, tough for you, get an interpreter. This is my language. (laughs) Also, our popular musicians. You would have heard of Bob Marley. He never spoke English. If you want to understand, you come figure it out. This is my language. So they are the ones who really have promoted the language internationally, paving the way for us now.

Hannes:

What about internally within the organization? Was that smooth sailing or did you have some critical voices there as well?

Ruth:

Well, thank God, internally, the person who preceded me as executive director, oh, he believes in this. And so the foundation had been set. I must confess that when I joined, I thought I was translating for monolingual Jamaican speakers. Until I had one of my daughters, not biological, who was getting married and she asked me to do a reading. And she wanted it done from the Jamaican New Testament. She asked me to read 1 Corinthians 13. So here was I reading, what for me was a favorite passage, but favorite it was not in that version. But I was reading it in Jamaican. And I’d gone just a few verses down and then I felt something in my throat and my voice was cracking. And I’m saying, Ruth, are you crazy? Are you going to cry at a girl’s wedding? This was that passage speaking to my heart. Here was God’s word speaking to me. When people have love in a them heart, then take time with people and then kind to them. But it was speaking not to my head, but to my heart. And I then knew that this was for me, an English speaker.

Hannes:

How do you read the Bible now in what language?

Ruth:

In Jamaican of course. So for example, Philippians 4 that says to me, “No worry, worry up yourself bout nuttin. Pray about everything. Give thanks.’ That speaks to me here. So when I get worried about anything, that’s one of my fallback Scriptures. Don’t worry worry up yourself bout nuttin.

Jo:

But that other verse that you quoted in 1 Corinthians 13 about spending time with people and listening to them, that’s what this process really is isn’t it? It’s not about rushing in and imposing our own preference but it’s building relationship and listening.

Ruth:

Very, very definitely. And that’s something that I’ve had to be very conscious of, in just our leadership processes. Listening — our staff is interesting. We have a couple of people who are on the older side like me and then we have the younger ones who I value a lot. I value everybody. But they bring so much to the table. But I’ve had to be patient and listen, because sometimes their ways of thinking are a little different from my. And I have to pause and take a deep breath. (laughs) But I learned so much from them.

Hannes:

You started by defining or describing discernment as the capacity to see beyond the obvious. I wonder what advice you could give to people who are in leadership and who have to discern. How can they learn or practice this looking beyond the obvious?

Ruth:

It also applies to people. Because essentially what we’re doing as leaders is relational. We’re reacting and interacting with people, and very often, and you know we talk about what you see is what you get, very often that’s not true. You have to really now get to the place where you’re really hearing people, and going beyond just what you see. I’ve had people for example one of my colleagues she said, ‘Oh my gosh. You have made me do so many things that I had no intention of doing or thought I would ever do.’ And it is simply again not just going with what you see, because some people will give you the impression, ‘I’m here to do this, and this is all I’m here to do.’

Hannes:

It also requires the humility to realize that what I see may not be the whole truth, but there is something that I may not yet realize,. So I better look closely, listen attentively.

Ruth:

Very definitely. You know, simple things like we begin each year with prayer. You know, we kind of assume that we’re all the same and not so. For example, this year, we just paused and said to people, ‘Just share from your heart.’ And the diversity was remarkable. And there’s some of us who are very effusive, and we will speak quickly and so on. And some other people, you need to just give them time. And if you just sit there and be quiet and give the time, you’ll be surprised.

Hannes:

Thank you so much, Ruth, for sharing your thoughts with us. I learned a lot.

Jo:

Seeing beyond the obvious, seeing with humility and realizing there is so much to learn and discern. Thank you, Ruth, for your wisdom and for your leadership at Wycliffe Caribbean.

Hannes:

I loved her thinking about listening patiently to a wide range of people and about listening deeply beyond the obvious or outward.

Jo:

Listening is such an important element as we seek to love others as ourselves. It seems that as Ruth listened, not only did she discover what God was saying, but those she was listening to did, too. And much more clearly than if she told them what she thought God was saying.

Hannes:

In fact, I’m not even sure she knew what God was saying. She may have had a hunch, but the listening process seemed to have sharpened her understanding. I guess this is part and parcel of what discernment is all about.

Jo:

This has been episode 4 of our current season of In the Company of Travellers. There’s much more to come on the topic of discernment. For now, we’re going to take a short pause before publishing additional episodes. Part of the reason behind this is to allow our listeners some time to reflect and respond. If you have questions or comments regarding any episode or topic so far, we’d love to hear from you. We might even include your questions or insights in a future episode. Please email us at info@wycliffe.net. See you soon.

Announcer:

In the Company of Travellers is a podcast of the Wycliffe Global Alliance. You can find much more about the Alliance, including news, reflection, partnership opportunities, and much more at Wycliffe.net.