A Powerful, New Way to Access God’s Word
The Colombia workshop began with a major setback: Mark’s colleague was diagnosed with shingles and couldn’t attend. Mark traveled to Colombia, knowing he’d be alone for at least the first few days until Edgar, an implementation assistant from Mexico, could arrive.
But Mark had the help of Susan*—an audio-visual consultant for the indigenous church—who organized and hosted the conference. She identified and recruited the six participants, booked travel tickets for those coming from outside the capital, arranged housing and meals for everyone, and also attended the entire workshop and built two websites.
Susan produces audio New Testament recordings alongside Faith Comes by Hearing and creates children’s videos. Her creations will find homes on websites built at this workshop or websites built later with skills gleaned from the workshop. According to Mark, “Since [these projects] promote the use of the translated Scriptures in largely oral cultures, they provide significant motivation for translation teams to carry on with their efforts.”
Sickness continued to be a problem as it swept to some of the participants during the workshop. A young woman from Susan’s church had planned to build the website for the children’s videos. She attended two days at the beginning, then had an asthma flare-up and couldn’t return. Susan picked up the reins on this website and finished it. Then, on the next-to-last day, Susan got sick, but with prayer and care, she was able to complete the second website.
All the participants were just as serious, committed, and highly motivated to learn and create quality websites. Frank* came to build a website in his local language for his people group of 4,900 people who live on the isolated coast of Colombia. Electricity had only arrived in his town during his lifetime, provided by local generators. Frank’s the pastor and leader of a small community of believers in his area. He’s also spearheading the translation of the Old Testament into his language, so it meant a lot to him that he could attend this workshop and build a website in his language.
At the workshop, Frank struggled when certain characters in his language didn’t display correctly on the website. Edgar, who regularly works on similar issues in Mexico, diagnosed Frank’s problems and found a temporary solution so Frank could finish and launch his website. Many of Frank’s people will be able to access that site on their cell phones.
Now, because of financial gifts from people like you, those who speak and understand Frank’s language have a new and powerful way to access God’s word via audio Scripture and JESUS films! Thank you!
*Name changed for security reasons.
