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Life story: Geoffrey (Geoffrey means ‘God's peace' ’)

Geoffrey is a remarkable man.
Remarkable in that he seems so ordinary.

He’d not stand out in a crowd,
nor (I think) would he want to.

Geoffrey and his wife, Rosemary, are members of Wycliffe Bible Translators.
They spent ten years living with the Hanga people in Ghana, West Africa, living in a remote village without the normal conveniences of life like electricity and running water.
They learnt the language, creating a written form for it, started literacy classes,
produced books on various topics and
translated parts of the Bible.

Now a church of believers has grown up around the bible he left. Geoffrey has been back – and made a chief to the tribe.
But Geoffrey himself has moved on.

So have Wycliffe.
These days, when they serve a group with no written language,
they set about training a group of story tellers,
who retell the bible as stories.

In this sort of society storytellers are valued for their accuracy
not (as in the West) for their inventiveness.

Geoffrey has turned his attention to sign language.
He would argue that people who can’t hear are isolated:
the last to discover what’s going on.

So he's now helping people who know sign language to do a better job at translating the Bible. Sign languages are very different from spoken languages and are not versions of the local spoken languages; so, for example, British Sign Language is not related to English, but can fully express the ideas that English can express.

Geoffrey is a remarkable man.
Who points to a still more remarkable God.

Last updated Jan 10 Entered June 08