by Anneliese Rider

As a freshman at Moody Bible Institute, Travis Williamson wasn’t interested in Bible translation. But when God led him first to translate the Bible in Ethiopia and then to Moody to train others to do the same, he followed.

Travis’s hands-on linguistics experience helps him teach with practical wisdom, but his true passion—evident through both his teaching and his plans for Moody’s Missions Conference 2025—is to help believers obey the Great Commission.

‘I’ll do anything but Bible translation’

Travis sat in his fifth-grade classroom in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and cried. He’d just realized that his classmates who didn’t know Jesus would go to hell.

Right then, he committed his life to helping people learn how to go to heaven. By his senior year of high school, he’d chosen a Bible college in Minnesota, but his mom wanted him to look at other options.

“I picked Trinity and Moody, knowing my mom would never let me come to the big city of Chicago,” Travis says, but his plan backfired. “We were blown away by the atmosphere of Moody and the way that they engaged their students in ministry from day one.”

In 1998, Travis began his studies at Moody in the Intercultural Studies program.

“I said, ‘I’ll do anything in missions, I just want to serve you, Lord—except I don’t really think I’m interested in linguistics, the Bible translation thing,’” Travis remembers.

During the first Founder’s Week conference he attended on Moody’s campus in February of 1999, this plan also backfired.

“When Marilyn Laszlo with Wycliffe Bible Translators shared her story, it showed me that Bible translation is not an office job,” Travis says. “It’s intimately walking alongside a people group and seeing God’s Word transform their life every step of the way.”

So Travis changed his major to Applied Linguistics and set his eyes on a future in Bible translation. After graduating in 2002, he started dating and later married Andrea Rockey, who he’d met as a freshman. They moved to Dallas after she graduated from Moody in 2003.

Giving the Gumuz people their own Bible

Travis attended Dallas Theological Seminary to earn his master’s degree in Theology with an emphasis in Bible translation. As he prepared to serve with Wycliffe Bible Translators, he learned about a community in Ethiopia—the Gumuz people—that would never access the Bible in their own heart language. A translation was available in a similar dialect, so they’d been crossed off the “to-do list” even though they didn’t understand the translation.

“We realized this need was going unnoticed,” Travis says. “We felt like the Lord was specifically tapping us to go and meet it.”

Travis and Andrea started learning the Gumuz people’s language in 2009. By 2012, Travis and a team of three Gumuz believers began the translation project. In response to an invitation from Steve Clark, head of Moody’s Applied Linguistics program, Travis took a year-long furlough in 2017 and served as an adjunct professor at Moody.

“I got to experience the classroom and the students and just see how my experience overseas could be used of God to prepare the next generation,” Travis says.

In 2019, Travis—the Moody freshman who promised he’d never do Bible translation—and his team completed translating the entire New Testament for the Gumuz people. They submitted it for publication and would present it in 2023. With the project finished, Travis received another invitation from Steve Clark. This time Steve divulged that he was retiring and asked Travis to consider taking over his position.

Travis accepted, and his family moved to Chicago, where he became head of the Applied Linguistics program. He later began serving as chair of Missions Conference in 2023.

‘The Lord’s going to do what He does’

The theme for Missions Conference 2025 is Unreached: Where Christ Is Not Yet Named. The theme verse is Romans 15:20–21: And thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.”

As Travis and his team finalize plans for the 2025 conference that will take place February 4 to 7 on Moody’s Chicago campus, Travis is looking forward to how the Lord knits it all together.

“I see all the different elements and I see how it could flow, but the Lord’s going to do what He does,” Travis says, mentioning how students have experienced this in the past. “Many of them point back to a particular Missions Conference as being key in what stoked a fire or a spark that was there or actually lit that fire to begin with.”

One of the aspects of Missions Conference that makes it so special to Travis is the student involvement. This year, in addition to two students helping Travis plan the conference, there are student emcees and worship bands for the main sessions, and students will be leading prayer times and giving testimonies.

“I like to have students up there as much as I can because it humanizes the idea of missions and saying that those from among us are going, and they need the support of all the rest of us that are here,” Travis says. “We, as members of the church, the body of Christ, ought to go about the business for which we’ve been commissioned.”

Missions Conference serves to remind students of how missions is an integral part of Moody’s DNA. It also prepares students to follow the Great Commission as they hear from dozens of missionaries who are doing just that.

“My main goal right now is that the whole church would see their role in the Great Commission,” Travis says. “What does being faithful to missions or to the Great Commission look like? It means loving people with the gospel. And that’s not too hard for anyone to do.”