Birth 26-03-1889
Home Calling: 04-03-1968
Native Place: Nebraska
Country: United States of America
Vision: Navajo and Apache people
Faye Elva Edgerton was a missionary and Bible translator. She led a worldly life all her school days. After completion of 12th grade, she suffered severely from scarlet fever and became deaf temporarily. After she recovered from sickness, she was determined to become a foreign missionary and joined Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After her graduation, she undertook linguistic training.
Later, Faye joined American Presbyterian Mission and went to Korea. However, after serving there for around four years she had to return to her homeland due to ill health. Later, she was assigned to work at a school in Arizona, on a Navajo reservation. At the school, children were permitted to speak only English and the use of Navajo was inhibited. But while preaching to the people, Faye realized the need for God’s Word to be delivered in the Navajo language and started to learn the language by herself.
In 1944, she finally could see that God is opening a way for her to do what He wanted her to do. Hence, she joined Wycliffe Bible Translators to translate the New Testament into the Navajo language. Along with the help of Geronimo Martin, a blind Navajo and another translator Roger Deal, she started to translate the New Testament. Faye split her time between translation and teaching to Navajos knowing that a translated Bible would be useless if people could not read it. After 10 years of ardent work, Navajo New Testament was published in 1956. She also revised translations of few Old Testament books.
Then Faye moved to San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona and started to learn the Apache language. With the help of another translator Faith Hill, she translated the New Testament into the Apache language. That was another ten years of work. In her 70s, she helped in the New Testament translation into Hopi and Inupiat languages and revised the Navajo New Testament. The tireless servant of God never stopped translating God’s Word till her last breath.
