Bibles and resources – UPDATED
Updated Aug 8, 2024
Do you know where to find Bibles in all the languages spoken by people attending your church (live or online), and the people living in your community?
Audio/Visual Scripture & Outreach Media Sources
Translation Technology: Accelerating the Spread of God’s Word
Technology can be a polarizing word. The idea of artificial intelligence or robots can seem exciting to some of us but scary to others. But did you know that technology is playing a critical role in building God’s Kingdom?
Andrew Flemming, vice president of global partnerships engagement for Wycliffe said,
These tools include things like: Starlink satellites, which provide stable internet; Render, which records oral Bible translations; and Chameleon, which enables the Bible to be translated into sign language in persecuted areas.
Read More »Translation Technology: Accelerating the Spread of God’s Word
The Dramatized Audio Bible
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.Read More »The Dramatized Audio Bible
Digital Bible Translations in the World’s Available Languages
As God’s Word becomes available in languages around the world through Bible translation, Scripture is added to digital Bible resources. You can access these Bibles online or download the apps for Android or iOS.
Read More »Digital Bible Translations in the World’s Available Languages
Planting “Gospel Seeds” Through Business Cards
Over the last year or two, during my infrequent visits to southern California, I began to notice a change in the ethnic mix of the men that gather early each morning in the parking lot of the Home Depot near our mission agency’s home office hoping to get work for the day. Typically the men had all been Mexicans, but I noticed newcomers that I suspected were Haitians.
Five years ago I tracked down the available Scripture resources in Haitian Creole and loaded them onto some “BibleBox” WiFi hotspot units for some Mexican believers reaching out among thousands of Haitians that ended up “stuck” in Tijuana, Mexico on their trek north. Now, for those with smartphones, directing Creole speakers to the Haitian Creole page* within the www.ScriptureEarth.org website seems to me to be the best option. They can have free access to 6 full-length Scripture movies**, the text of multiple translations of the New Testament, audio recordings of the NT in 3 different Creole translations, and a variety of audio recordings produced by the Global Recordings Network.
The Untapped Power of Media for Mobilization
The State of the World
In a survey done by Barna Research, it showed that 51% of the U.S. churchgoers do not know the Great Commission and 63% could not even correctly identify Matthew 28:18-20 as the Great Commission when given 5 verses to choose from. Media and social media have played a major role in desimination of information whether true or false, and have lead to response and action among people. Are we creating enough digital awareness through videos and on social media about the needs of the Unreached People Groups?
Scripture Engagement Guide
We exist so that local communities everywhere are engaging with Scripture in transformative ways.
We empower communities to make informed and sustainable decisions for their future. The journey isn’t ever a perfectly linear process – instead we come alongside communities as they try an idea, evaluate the results, and then take their next steps. This is more about the process than the products that may be created or utilized along the way. The journey through the site can be expressed in four general stages:
Script Fit Videos
In 2019 I went to Southeast Asia to oversee a video dubbing. The team there assured me they had prepared the script to fit the video’s timing, and it was ready for recording. But when we began to dub the video, we realized that, in many parts, segments were too long. In other parts, as we watched the video, we realized that we could often see the actor’s mouth moving but nothing was being said in the dubbed language. We spent many hours of several days adjusting the script to achieve a good dubbing. We needed a translation consultant to approve every change. Precious recording time was lost and the dubbing took days longer than planned.
When I returned to IMS-Waxhaw, many of my colleagues told me similar experiences they had had on the field. Something needed to be done to help prevent the “script fit blues.” All the instructions for preparing the script are in the Shell Video Manual (Step Five), which every field team receives when they apply to dub a video. But the manual can be a difficult read, especially for non-English speakers. And many people think that when it comes to script fitting, they already know everything they need to know. So I wrote the scripts, and we assembled a team to create two animated videos explaining the why and how of script fitting. Read More »Script Fit Videos
Audio/Visual Scripture & Outreach Media Sources
The following is a question that I regularly get asked by “on-the-ground” workers- “How can I find out what scripture/ministry media is available online in my people’s language so I can download and use in our outreach?” The below are the main websites I know to point people to that allow them to search for and download media in their language: