The Audio Bible: Multi-voice, dramatized, high-quality, pure Word of God. It’s a standard of Faith Comes By Hearing and the typical model employed by our recording teams worldwide. But who came up with such a ground-breaking methodology?
It all started on a bus. Anet Jackson, co-founder of Hosanna (the original name of Faith Comes By Hearing), found great joy in sharing the Gospel with children via puppet shows in the various towns her family would visit during their itinerant ministry days. At Vacation Bible Schools around the western United States, Anet and her four children brought Scripture to life via dramatized portrayals of biblical stories.
In 1985, while the Hosanna Christian tape-lending library was in full swing, we discovered the primary New Testament recording we distributed could no longer be used due to copyright reasons. That meant a warehouse full of tapes went obsolete overnight.
A pivot was needed—immediately.
Determined to continue providing God’s Word in audio, Hosanna created a proprietary, single-voice recording of the Bible. Work resumed, and our storerooms again filled with brand-new tapes featuring our in-house recording of Scripture, both Old Testament and New Testament.
While the recording was of exceptional quality and received good feedback from U.S. churches, Anet considered how Hosanna might be able to reach children with the Word. Thinking back to her Vacation Bible School teaching days, she pitched a bold idea to her husband Jerry: Record Bible stories with multiple voices, add music and sound effects, and make them available to families for their children to hear. She put together a multi-voice script, photocopying each page and highlighting each part, and assigned readers their portions. The surprising result: A beautiful rendition of God’s Word that not only enraptured children but captivated their parents as well.
Once ministries around the world discovered our English multi-voice Audio Scripture, they pleaded for these dramatized recordings for their own people and languages. In her 50s, Anet traveled the world to conduct recording projects and train teams—a practice she spearheaded for two more decades.
The painstaking process was not without difficulty. What if lines were missed or needed re-recording? Anet’s giant binder full of photocopied, highlighted Bible pages became the foundation for a revolutionary and innovative methodology—one that would ensure complete, accurate, and transferable recording files. With Jerry’s encouragement, engineers at the ministry’s Albuquerque office employed Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic to create CORE-Script, an automated, line-by-line scripting software field teams could use to make sure their Bible recordings were up to par by the time they went to the studio for mastering.
In Anet and Jerry’s innovative spirit, Faith Comes By Hearing has been hard at work to create a successor to the CORE-Script. Once complete, this software platform will usher in a new era of Scripture recording. Yet even today, after decades and more than a thousand recording projects, our teams still use the CORE-Script to create accurate Audio Bibles. And it all started with Anet and her love for presenting the Gospel message in an accessible way.
Out of necessity, Anet started recording Scripture; out of a vision, she dramatized Scripture recordings; out of obedience, she forged a path for others to follow.