Posted on 01/24/2007 5:24:55 AM PST by Quix
FAITH COMES BY HEARING--NT ON MP3 [SOLA SCRIPTURA PROVEN]
By Quix with appendixes from the FCBH website
Pastor Brent, of our church—DESERT HEIGHTS COMMUNITY CHURCH—has partnered with FAITH COMES BY HEARING (FCBH) to collect $25,000 to translate the NT into a South American language. The Seranon sp? people group have had written Scriptures since the late 1800’s as I recall. But the vast majority (90%?) of the population are illiterate.
The organization brings together the copyright holders of at least one major Bible translation with the means and resources of translating Scripture into language groups where there is no Scripture available or where the people are too illiterate to make use of what may be available.
Once the Scriptures have been translated, they are put on a windup MP3 player and given to A MAN OF PEACE in a village in the language group. The man agrees to host all who want to listen once a week—listening for 30 minutes and discussing for 30 minutes. More is an option.
About 6 out of 10 times A CHURCH SPONTANEOUSLY APPEARS—FUNCTIONING, HEALTHY, BIBLICAL. Many times, MULTIPLE CHURCHES ARISE spontaneously—from one MP3 player as it’s shared beyond the original agreement.
CLEARLY HOLY SPIRIT IS WELL ABLE TO INSURE THAT GOD’S WORD DOES NOT RETURN VOID. MORE IMPORTANTLY, HOLY SPIRIT HAS REPEATEDLY MADE CLEAR OVER 30 YEARS THAT HE IS WELL ABLE TO ESTABLISH HIS CHURCH AND MAINTAIN IT’S HEALTHY FUNCTIONING
WITHOUT
ANY BUREAUCRACY FROM THE WEST OR ANYWHERE ELSE. . . .
without any tradition bound, traditions of men infected magesterium;
without any pontifical seminaries;
without any arguments about the original artifacts;
without any trumped up line of political succession;
without any denominational pride, parochialness and haughtily held distinctives;
without any formal or informal inquisitions;
without any arrogant authoritarian doctrinal police;
WITHOUT any elaborate explanations and straight jackets about how GOD CAN’T/WOULDN’T DO IT THAT WAY; GOD WOULDN’T DO !THAT!
WITHOUT anything but GOD’S WORD. TRULY LITERAL SOLA SCRIPTURA.
AND FROM HIS WORD, GOD PERSISTENTLY SPRINGS, BIRTHS HEALTHY ENDURING CHURCHES WHICH GO ON TO MATURE THEIR BELIVERS IN THE FAITH AND TO PLANT NEW CHURCHES.
PRAISE GOD FOR HIS FAITHFULNESS. PRAISE GOD FOR HIS ABILITY TO DO HIS WORK without our flesh driven organizations mucking it up.
PRAISE GOD FOR THE FREEDOM OF HIS SALVATION AND LIFE IN HIS SPIRIT!
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Below are some selected portions from the FCBH website with links. I strongly encourage all true believers to consider this organization in their prayers and however else God might lead. Those with translating and other helpful skills and resources might find a place of service that could be very rewarding.
We are a small congregation. Already we are more than 1/5 toward the $25,000 goal of translating the NT into the Seranon language orally—in less than 6-10 months (I don’t recall for sure). It may be something God would lead your church to consider.
BTW, churches who partner with the organization get MP3 format CD’s for their members to listen to Scripture in their homes and cars. FAITH COMES BY HEARING has proven over and over again to be a productive, fruitful blessing in the lives of those of us who have useful written Scriptures. There’s just something about repeatedly HEARING Scripture that is spiritually potent and life-giving.
IIRC, using such methods, it is projected that all the language groups still without Scripture can have it within the next 8-12 years. This should alert all who pay attention to Biblical prophecy . . . related to Scripture being spread to all language groups/people groups throughout the world before Christ’s return.
MAY GOD CONTINUE TO BLESS THE HEARING OF HIS WORD.
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APPENDIXES:
HOSANNA/Faith Comes By Hearing is a non-profit, religious organization founded in 1972. The purpose of the organization is wholly religious: to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord in all that we do.
Trusting Jesus Christ as our Savior, we believe in:
The Bible as the inspired Word of God. The deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son. The vicarious death of Jesus Christ for our sins, His bodily resurrection and His personal return. The presence and power of the Holy Spirit in the work of regeneration.
Vision Our Vision is to bring His Church together and make disciples.
Mission Statement To accomplish our vision, we are committed to putting every translation of the Bible in audio form, and to implementing Faith Comes By Hearing in every church or village in the world, so that all people, especially the 50% of the world who cannot read, can hear God's Word in the language they pray in.
Hosanna/Faith Comes By Hearing is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
More than half the world cannot read and in some countries as many as 80-90% are illiterate. And even people from an oral tradition who CAN read, often learn best by listening.
Faith Comes By Hearing® is dedicated to overcoming every barrier of illiteracy, poverty, or oral culture, so that people around the world can hear God's Word in the "heart languages," find salvation in Jesus Christ and become disciples. The Audio New Testament breaks the barriers, bringing poor and illiterate people to God's Word.
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How it works:
From:
http://www.hosanna.org/HowItWorks.pdf
Local pastors and village leaders commit with their people to listen through the New Testament for at least 30 minutes each week, followed by discussion.
Many sessions are held outdoors for lack of a room large enough to accommodate all who want to hear.
Attendance, testimonies and commitments are tracked and reported to FCBH.
A check is made 6 weeks after placing an MP3 player with the NT. If a church has not spontaneously arisen, the MP3 player is taken to a different village and MAN OF PEACE to host it.
Approximately 6 out of 10 times, a church appears spontaneously--LITERALLY SOLA SCRIPTURA by Holy Spirit’s work through the spoken Word and the hearts of the listeners.
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Pdf report of 30 years of Faith Comes By Hearing here:
http://www.hosanna.org/newsletter_30-yr.pdf
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LANGUAGES THAT MP3 PLAYERS ARE NOW AVAILABLE IN AT THIS LINK:
http://www.hosanna.org/Products/Search_p.cfm?CFID=248914&CFTOKEN=75276606
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In four years, 6,375 people believed . . . from a Wycliffe article here:
http://www.faithcomesbyhearing.com/wfl.pdf
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YWAM article on winning the ORAL MAJORITY from this link:
http://www.ywam.org/articles/article.asp?AID=346&bhcp=1
Winning the Oral Majority Mission agencies rethink outreach to the world's non-literate masses By Dawn Herzog Jewell
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Jesus and his band of disciples proclaimed a revolutionary message through stories, parables, and proverbs. Although few members of the early church could read or write, the message of the gospel took root, owing partly to its method of proclamation. Today, a number of mission leaders are calling for a return to Jesus' oral method of communicating. The majority of the world's people, they say, won't be reached any other way.
"Seventy percent of the world's people today can't, don't, or won't read," says Avery Willis, executive director of the recently formed International Orality Network (ION), a partnership of 22 mission agencies including the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board (IMB), Youth With a Mission (YWAM), Trans World Radio, Campus Crusade for Christ, and Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, Willis says, Western Christianity "has walked on literate feet," indirectly requiring literacy for evangelism and discipleship. Yet more than 4 billion of the world's people are oral learners. According to the 2004 Lausanne paper "Making Disciples of Oral Learners," nearly 90 percent of the world's Christian workers serve among auditory learners and often use inappropriate, literacy-based communication styles.
ION seeks to equip mission agencies, churches, and individuals in effective oral strategies, and its mobilization of vastly different agencies has already been a feat in itself. "The amazing thing is we've all come with an attitude of what we can give, not what we can get," Willis says. "We've all agreed to leave our logos and egos at the door."
Powered by Partnership Reaching the oral majority for Christ requires communicating in forms familiar to oral cultures, such as stories, proverbs, drama, songs, chants, and poetry.
The Lausanne paper tells the testimony of an Indian Hindu, a pastor named Dinanath, who came to Christ in 1995 through the work of a cross-cultural missionary. When Pastor Dinanath returned to his village in 1998 following two years of Bible college, he began preaching in the way he'd been taught. But few villagers showed any interest, leaving him discouraged and confused.
The next year, Pastor Dinanath attended a seminar on storytelling methods. He realized that a lecture style and printed books couldn't reach his people, so he changed his preaching. He began telling Bible stories and singing gospel songs put to traditional music.
By 2004, his village church had multiplied into 75 churches with 1,350 baptized members. "This is the next wave in missions," Willis says, "like a Gutenberg II."
A former senior vice president for the IMB, Willis saw the door for cross-agency collaboration open in 1995 at the AD2000 and Beyond Movement's Korea gathering. It was there that he publicly repented for the Southern Baptists' pride in believing they could reach the world by themselves. Later, at the Amsterdam 2000 conference, a group of nine mission leaders including Willis formed an informal organization, Table 71, to begin talking about ways to work together. In February 2005, ION was formed.
Willis is quick to cite the gifts of agencies involved in ION: "Wycliffe brings the integrity of Bible translation, the IMB contributes church planting and Bible storying methodology, Campus Crusade brings its global media expertise in the Jesus film and its work on college campuses, YWAM brings its training and recruiting gifts, Trans World Radio has the ability to put stories on radio, and so on."
That's not to say that the agencies agree on everything. Although Wycliffe actively participates in ION, it remains committed to literacy training and Scripture translation for the world's minority language groups. Freddy Boswell, Wycliffe International's vice president for Scripture promotion, hesitates to throw his full support behind the orality movement. "There's an emotional rush to meet oral needs. It's something new and exciting to say, 'Hey, can we do something to reach 70 percent of the world's population?' " he says. "But let's not forget literacy and translation."
Wycliffe still promotes study of the printed Word as the key to evangelism and long-term discipleship.
Morgan Jackson, international director of Hosanna/Faith Comes By Hearing (FCBH), affirms that, ideally, "orality never moves people away from literacy—it moves them to literacy."
Working with Wycliffe and national Bible societies, Jackson's ministry records and distributes Scripture readings around the world. After hearing the Scriptures, many listeners immediately want to read the Bible themselves, Jackson says.
Last year, FCBH joined the Jesus Film Project to test an outreach program in 28 languages. Following more than 4,000 showings of the Jesus film, local volunteers trained by FCBH led weekly Scripture-listening and discussion groups. The results surpassed all expectations. In Nigeria, 10,000 people made decisions for Christ, and 7,900 joined listening groups. Six months later, 42 of the groups had become churches. "Before, when you showed the Jesus film in some places," Jackson says, "people came to Christ, but you could come back six months later and nothing would exist."
It can take time to train cross-cultural workers in oral techniques, which require a greater appreciation for the concrete. Trans World Radio's training courses contrast how oral and literate learners think.
"When we're taught to read and write, one of our first lessons in literacy is categorizing shapes into circles, triangles, and squares," media services officer Tom Tatlow says. "But an oral person would say, 'That's a wheel, a pie, or a box.'"
Thanks to ION and others, oral strategies are beginning to seep into local church missions. At a Finishing the Task conference held in November at the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina, ION provided each church that selected an unreached people group with resources for oral strategies. Also, one of the five thrusts of the ambitious PEACE plan launched by Saddleback Church's Rick Warren targets literacy. Curtis Sergeant, Saddleback's director of church planting, stocks Saddleback's website with resources for training literacy tutors and employing oral strategies in a range of ministries.
LaNette Thompson, an orality consultant for IMB, has been receiving more requests than she can accept from mission agencies. She says that seminaries and church leaders in West Africa have been slow to accept oral strategies, because Western missionaries have instilled "the expectation that church leaders must be literate." However, Thompson believes gospel storying will catch on with African women, traditionally the storytellers in their families.
In early 2007, ION plans to hold a consultation in Delhi, India. "We really want to raise indigenous leaders on every continent who take this message and do what they need to do," Willis says.
While orality may make headlines in the West, its strategies aren't novel for majority-world Christians, says Scott Moreau, editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly and chair of Wheaton Graduate School's intercultural studies department. Moreau points to the explosion of the church in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the last 50 years.
"We might be reinventing a wheel that they've been using a long time," he says. "But it's exciting that we're discovering for ourselves what's going on and using it to the kingdom's advantage."
Dawn Herzog Jewell works for Media Associates International, a communications training ministry. Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. March 2006, Vol. 50, No. 3, Page 56
Ref: categorie(s): News, News Events, Partnership, Stories: News
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United Bible Societies article here:
http://www.biblesociety.org/wr_402/402_contents.htm
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Well, that's the point of this article, isn't it?
Yes it is. Just trying to help keep you stay on track.
Exactly! And so let me ask you...If someone could not even READ the Bible, could he or she STILL have a lasting eternal relationship with Christ.
Exactly! And so let me ask you...If someone could not even READ the Bible, could he or she STILL have a lasting eternal relationship with Christ.
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Of course. Seems like a silly question, to me.
Perhaps you've heard of Saul aka Paul? He didn't have an MP3 player of Scripture; a Dake's reference Bible; a Thompson Chain nor even THE MESSAGE on the back side of the desert for 3 years.
My God is the same yesterday, today and forever.
Holy Spirit is NOT limited by lack of wood pulp and ink or lack of MP3 players.
Mercifully, He chooses, USUALLY to work through such . . . but not exclusively.
SAMUEL MORRIS and THE MARCH OF FAITH demonstrates Holy Spirit's capacity to speak Biblical truth into a soul directly. There have been many other examples.
Thankfully, folks have been led to Bible study and maturing of their faith through Bible study.
But God is not limited.
My God is NOT in a tidy little limited box.
He can convey His Biblical truth any number of diverse and miraculous ways DIRECTLY.
It is His mercy and grace THAT HE HAS INCLUDED US and mundane technologies to aid in the spread of His Gospel.
But He has been speaking His truth directly into hearts and minds, spirits and lives for many millenia.
He has NOT forgotten how.
LOL.
Whosoever will, may come.
Casting bread upon the waters is a good thing.
Amen. Exactly.
Ok, very good.
He can convey His Biblical truth any number of diverse and miraculous ways DIRECTLY.
Indeed! But what about when He seems to give different "truths" to different people so that good Christians seem to differ on important matters...pre-mil/post-mil...free will/predestination. How does that come about?
He can convey His Biblical truth any number of diverse and miraculous ways DIRECTLY.
Indeed! But what about when He seems to give different "truths" to different people so that good Christians seem to differ on important matters...pre-mil/post-mil...free will/predestination. How does that come about?
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I used to whine a lot about that to Him.
Eventually, He led me to an understanding that I can only offer as my conviction . . .
1. He's God. He COULD have made the last jot and tittle abundantly, exceedingly, precisely clear. Evidently He chose not to.
2. What possible reason might He have had for being so sloppy on so many details?
3. Christ died to restore walk-in-the-garden-in-the-cool-of-the-evening-fellowship with DADDY.
4. Holy Spirit came to facilitate such dialogue.
5. Holy Spirit came to lead into all truth.
6. Christ made clear in many mentions of the pharisees that some things were hidden from some bad faith sorts of hearts and revealed to those with a true heart after God.
7. This is boot camp with many tests.
8. Scripture declares that He will have a tried people through many refiner's fires.
9. I don't think a lot of details matter as crucially to Daddy FOR US IN THIS DIMENSION AT THIS TIME as we think they do. Else He'd have made them more precisely clear. He's not handicapped in the MAKING CLEAR department or any other way.
10. Those who dig; pray; fast; seek His Face about truth--find Him at deeper and deeper levels. He seems to not only enjoy that but require it. And to require it IN DIALOGUE WITH HIM vs isolated distant study with ink and wood pulp.
11. Those who don't remain bickering children over tinker toys.
12. Those who do major in majors and minor in minors and love others who differ on minors (and even their enemies) as Christ and go on joyously closer to God together regardless.
Yeah, I think the petty bickering more than annoys God. I think it often outrages Him. And He will have a church in uinity of Spirit though probably not on all the petty details. But it's clearly going to be in His timing and His way. We don't have what it takes to force unity.
We still feel like murdering our brothers and sisters over their choice of sanctuary carpet colors.
12. Those who do major in majors and minor in minors and love others who differ on minors (and even their enemies) as Christ and go on joyously closer to God together regardless.
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Those who do dig truths out with God in deeper dialogue tend to major in majors and minor in minors and love others who differ . . .
Truly I believe those theological differences between us Christians all work together for the good and exist by the permissive will of God.
Jesus could have chosen twelve disciples with the personality of a John. But He gave us Peter, James, Thomas and so on - even Judas. Each of their personalities speak to us.
Likewise in the book of Revelation, the seven churches have different "personalities" - different challenges and such.
In this beautiful mix of colors and contrasts and Light, each Christian can find something that relates to himself on a deep, spiritual level.
The bottom line that holds it all together is that we first and above all else love God absolutely - and as a distant second, love our neighbor unconditionally. (Matt 22) All the law and the prophets "hang" on those two commandments, everything else is "details."
I think we're on the same page in this respect. You're brilliantly echoing an old old saying, I think of one of the Church Fathers:
"In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, diversity. And in all things, charity."
What's major and what's minor is where we get into the pickle jar, I think! ;)
Yes, and Amen! Fellowship is Sweet when we Gather Around our Savior and Make Him our Sole and Only Delight.
Ha! Having been on the decorating committee for our new addition a number of years ago and agonizing over carpet, I can feel your pain on that last one.
May God bless you both!
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