Friday, November 26, 2010

Using Technology to share Jesus...

RADIO LESSON1

Spreading the Gospel Through Technology

I've been reading The Washington Post nearly my entire life, but it still has the capacity to surprise me. This time, I was pleasantly surprised. On today's front page was a lengthy profile of how various Christian groups are using technology to reach pre-literate people groups around the world. Neither snarky nor suspicious, this straightforward account highlighted the innovative methods Christians are using to get the Word out. When I finished reading it, I broke out into spontaneous thanksgiving and worship, thanking the Lord for the myriad ways He uses His people to glorify Himself. I also took note of the author's name (Mary Jordan, of The Washington Post Foreign Service), and prayed that God would bless her in her work.

"Plugging the Planet Into the Word" begins this way:

RONG DOMRIEX, Cambodia -- Tel Im, a barefoot 13-year-old, sat cross-legged on a bamboo bench, eager for her reading lesson.
"Please turn to Lesson 33," said a woman's voice rising from a Sony cassette player powered by two wires clipped to a car battery. The tape was the closest thing to a school in this village shaded by banana trees, where water buffaloes meander in from the lime-green rice paddies.

Im and her classmates flipped to Page 134 for a passage from the New Testament.

"The title of this story is: 'Jesus Was Crucified,' " said the teacher on the tape, slowly pronouncing the words in Khmer, the local language, as the children followed along with their fingertips.

Six months ago, Im couldn't read a word and had never heard of Jesus. Now, thanks to a literacy program run by the local chapter of an international Bible group, she has a book -- the Bible -- that she can read, and she says she wants to become a Christian.

Using technological devices ranging from simple cassette tapes to solar-powered audio players and an iPod-like gadget called the Bible Stick, Christian groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to make one of the world's oldest books accessible in remote corners of the planet.

Complete versions of the Bible can now be downloaded onto cellphones in parts of Africa. To reach those who can't read -- nearly one-fifth of the world's population, according to the United Nations -- Christian groups are rapidly increasing production of audio and video versions.

Christian networks from the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are working together, coordinating the efforts of people as diverse as a computer cartographer in Virginia and linguists in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.

Since 2000, the Bible -- or parts of it -- has been translated into 600 more languages, making it more accessible to tens of millions more people, according to the Forum of Bible Agencies International. An additional 1,600 translation projects are underway that will leave only about 3 to 5 percent of the world's population without the best-selling book of all time available in their native language.

Building on generations of work to distribute the printed Bible, Christian missionaries said new multimedia presentations in hundreds of languages are vastly expanding the Bible's audience and spreading the influence of the world's largest religion.

"It's a movement to revitalize religion in the world, and it's huge," said Laurie Westlake of Faith Comes By Hearing, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that works in 92 countries.

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