History of the Aztec Ministry, from generation to generation to generation:

In 1961, Dick Beller (a graduate of Detroit Bible College) joined Wycliffe Bible Translators as a single missionary. 

He partnered with a fellow single missionary, Bill Sischo and lived among the Michoacan Aztecs beginning in 1962.  

 Patricia Cowan Beller accepted Christ as her Savior after attending  a Billy Graham Crusade in Atlanta, GA. She graduated from Baylor University and joined Wycliffe in 1959. God called her to be a missionary and particularly focus on Bible translation through the deaths of Ecuadorian missionaries: Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. 

 Pat joined the Mexico Branch of WBT and was a single missionary  for five years among the Otomi Indians and helped to 

finish the translation of the New Testament into the Otomi language. She then worked among the Mixteco Indians a

nd completed language analysis in Mixteco.  

Dick and Pat grew fond of each other while working in Tlalpan (a linguistics headquarters in Mexico City) in December of 1967 and were married in June of 1968.  Together they were assigned to the Huasteca Nahuatl language and began to live among the people in the village of Cuatenahuatl, Hidalgo in 1969.  This ended up being   an Eastern dialect village (Huasteca Nahuatl Oriental). 

 There they built a home and provided urgent medical care in a primitive clinic. They had three children during these early years. Richard Beller, Michael Beller and Tami Beller Gaddis. Linguistically, they completed various publications (reading primers, cartillas, textos, etc…) and a popular two-volume language course called Curso del Nahuatl Moderno (printed in1979 and reprinted in 1982,1985). They completed the translation of the Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl New Testament in 1984.