She Was Leader in Bible Translation
Townsend was face of Wycliffe International, support group JAARS
Elaine Mielke Townsend, for 25 years the face of the Bible-translators group Wycliffe International and its support organization known as JAARS, will be laid to rest Saturday outside Waxhaw beside her husband, the group’s founder. Townsend died Saturday at a Rock Hill hospital after a brief illness. She was 91.
She had served as JAARS’s and Wycliffe’s elder stateswoman until she suffered a stroke at her Waxhaw home in February 2006.
Her husband, William Cameron Townsend, co-founded the groups’ earliest incarnation, Camp Wycliffe, in Sulphur Springs, Ark., along with a traveling evangelist and Bible teacher, Leonard L. Legters, in 1934.
In 1948, Cameron Townsend founded JAARS, headquartered in Union County, south of Waxhaw. The group provides a variety of services and personnel – from audio cassettes to computer technicians to pilots – for over 6,000 missionaries with the Wycliffe Bible Translators group around the world. The group’s mission is to translate the Bible into nearly 1,300 languages and teach native people to read the Scripture in their own language.
Elaine Townsend served as the groups’ advocate, promoter, public speaker and networker, said Jim Akovenko, president of JAARS.
“If ever there was a first lady of Bible translation, she was it,” Akovenko said.
Elaine Mielke was born in 1915 and grew up in Chicago. She later oversaw special education programs in the city’s school district. She joined the newly formed Wycliffe Bible Translators and moved to Mexico in the 1940s, where she conducted literacy campaigns and prepared teaching materials.
She met Cameron Townsend in 1944, shortly after the death of his first wife. They married two years later. Her work with the Bible translators group took her from Peru to Papua, New Guinea, and many points in between. Townsend even served as her husband’s interpreter on their 11 trips to the Soviet Union.
“She was very friendly, very open,” said Adelle Elson, who befriended Townsend in Mexico in the 1940s. “She was thoughtful and inclusive of everybody.”
Arthur Lightbody, communications director at JAARS, said Townsend insisted on meeting all of the center’s 600 staff members and volunteers. Each was welcome to join her, Lightbody said, in the center’s cafeteria at a table with a small sign with the words “Elaine’s table.”
Townsend is survived by daughters Grace Goreth, Joy Tuggy and Elainadel Garippa; a son, Bill Townsend; 21 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Article by Mike Torralba. Reprinted with permission from the Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by the Charlotte Observer.
