ABR MEDIA is organizing a REGIONAL CONFERENCE to take place in ARUSHA, TANZANIA in AUGUST. There will be three opportunities to gather, learn together and to NETWORK as we continue in MEDIA ministry here in SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA .
Read More »ABR Media Conferences August 2024 – SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
ICETE & Michael A. Ortiz
Theological Education more Globally Connected
At present, there are nearly 50,000 training programs for church leadership worldwide. Some are formal, while many are less structured. Some are complicated and at times bureaucratically stalled, while others are nimble and ready to shift on a dime. Some are accredited, some are not and desire to be, and some are not and do not care to be. Some are in-person, some are distance models and highly flexible including online formats. Some are local, perhaps regional programs in a single language, while some are global and even extending across various cultures and languages. The array of programs, objectives, modalities, and scopes have expanded beyond our capacity to quantify all of them.
Read More »International Council for Evangelical Theological Education (ICETE)
Lament is loving our neighbors with our tears.
~Lamma Mansour~
Lament as an Offering
As I sat quietly listening to Filipe’s heartbreaking story of the brutal attack that left him paralyzed from the neck down, tears streamed down my cheeks. The video crew, along with Filipe and his wife, passed around a single role of toilet paper as we each tore a piece to blot away tears. Our small crew borrowed an office on the outskirts of Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi to record powerful stories of transformation and healing from trauma that many in the camp had been experiencing.
Starting in February 2024, the 8-week Culture meets Scripture training programme aims to equip participants with a way of thinking and a tool for digging deeper into cultural practices and ways of living, aligning them with Scripture so that we can make choices that honour God.
The online interactions will happen via the EMDC platform – to register for the class please sign up via EMDC here.
The mission of Faith Comes By Hearing revolves around making God’s Word accessible to everyone. This commitment drives them to tirelessly expand the reach of Scripture’s life-saving message. They achieve this by producing Audio Bibles in various languages and making them freely available.
Research shows that seventy percent of the global population primarily learns through listening. This majority, particularly in oral cultures without written systems, grasps the essence of the Bible most effectively when they hear it spoken aloud. As a result, in these oral communities, faith is nurtured and propagated through the act of hearing.
Good News Media developed this Sunday School curriculum based on GRN’s Look, Listen & Live series. This is a series of eight Sunday School leaders’ guide books, with 24 complete Sunday School lessons for children between the ages of 7-12. The leader’s guide books complement the Look, Listen & Live picture books. To order, contact GRN Southern Africa. Or you can download the books in PDF format for free.
Sunday School lesson plans based on the “Good News” and “Look, Listen and Live” series of audio-visual materials from Global Recordings. (https://globalrecordings.net/en/teaching)
The ‘Good News‘ and ‘Look Listen & Live‘ flipcharts, and the digital Bible Picture Pack, are invaluable aides to those working in children’s ministries. We have developed lesson plans to accompany the ‘Good News‘ and all eight of the ‘Look Listen & Live‘ books. These lesson plans, and the accompanying black & white outline drawings for colouring-in, are free to download.
Read More »Sunday School Lesson Resources and Teaching Materials
Medical Outreach for Scripture Engagement Sustainability (MOSES): A Case Study on the MOSES methodology in South Asia
Submission for the 2021 Bible Translation Conference
After decades of tireless sowing by pioneers around the globe, national movements to translate the Scriptures into non-dominant language groups have truly sprung to life in the Global South. With hundreds of translations being published in the last twenty years, recent data shows that many of these Bibles do not have much of an audience. In many cases, the problem has become people-less Bibles rather than Bible-less peoples. Our team was convinced that the remedy to the lack of demand for the book is to introduce people to the Author. The Medical Outreach for Scripture Engagement and Spiritual growth (MOSES) approach adapts the Leader Source spiritual formation program design methodology to working with local stakeholders to build bridges to the Bible through God encounters that meet the felt needs of the community.
All of effective Eurasian Kingdom initiatives are built on two key elements: 1) Effective Communications 2) Effective Collaboration – How we work together. Long-time EMDC champion, Phill Butler, is an acknowledged expert in these fields. His book, Well Connected, the global “bible” of partnership and network development is now in a dozen languages. Phill has just completed a great new resource website with 140+ articles and 30+ videos on these topics.
Story group in West Africa
What makes a good oral Bible story? There are many ministries that develop oral Bible stories, and they have varying approaches on the process of developing an abbreviated and simplified story from a biblical passage(s).
Good story development follows four principles embraced by many in the story community of biblically faithful to the textual Bible passage(s), orally reproducible (meaning that that story can be easily learned and told by others), naturally told and the story is appropriate to the culture, often expressed in the use of key terms understood by the local community. In addition, a good oral Bible story based on a Bible passage(s) has a plot or story line that keeps the listener interested and engaged. The actual storyteller can also influence the quality of the story experience to the listener
When developing an oral Bible story, a ministry may embrace common elements practiced by other story practitioners (e.g., testing the story with those who don’t follow Jesus) while having nuances (e.g., use of technology) in the story development process that is unique to the ministry.
So what makes a good oral Bible story? Two important aspects are fidelity to an established process and people embracing the story.
While this blog departs a little from the normal EMDC topics it has been dealt with in the past. An Introduction to Healing the Wounds… Read More »Trauma Healing – Strength from Weakness
The Choice is Yours
Reach4Life is a comprehensive, Christian life skills program for young people — with a particular focus on identity, sexuality, and relationships — that brings about holistic spiritual and behavioural transformation. It is based on the idea that real comprehensive behavioral change is only possible once there is a spiritual revolution in the hearts and minds of young people.
Reach4Life is designed to inspire youth to plug into a relationship with God, the raw power of the Bible, the wisdom of saving lovemaking for marriage, the support of a local church, the beauty of a transformed life, and the opportunity to change the world one person at a time.
Scripture Engagement: Planning for the Journey
It’s not enough to translate the Bible. It’s not even enough to distribute the Bible. Our desire is to see real Scripture Engagement: people encountering God’s Word in life-changing ways. A three part series (3 sets of 10 one hour sessions) centred on Wayne Dye’s Eight Conditions for Scripture Engagement (below) will be hosted on EMDC.online early in 2022. These conditions are the ones at the heart of the EMDC.guide and Scripture Engagement courses taught at university.
Each one hour class will have 20 minutes of discussion. Update: Classes are now finished but stay connected for news of when this runs again!
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Create Taiwan
As of today, the 2021 AniMissions Seminar has been underway already for one week. Fourteen students from seven countries have jumped into this adventure in learning animation for the purpose of frontier missions. This is our first ever online school, so you can imagine a lot of issues had to worked out during the first week. Thanks to Keegan, the designer of the Campfire site, things are running relatively smoothly.
A Nudge
One of our hopes in transitioning to an online program was to expand our training to reach those who are working on the field and would not have the ability to travel to Taiwan. We are delighted to see this hope being fulfilled already as two teams working in the 10/40 window are participating, along with other individuals from the Global South.
In fact, all fourteen students are either involved or are preparing to be involved in missions, so we are already more effectively reaching our target audience. The recent pandemic and especially the closing of the Taiwan border gave us the push we needed to move quickly into this online learning venture, and we are grateful to God for this.
A Foundation
Last week, the students learned about culture and contextualization, story structure, scriptwriting and storyboarding. These are all foundational teachings on which we build the main 3D graphics and animation section of the course. They were also introduced to our main software tool, Blender, and ended the week with a tutorial on how to build and animate a simple rocket. This week, they will dive fully into learning the Blender modeling process, so things will get a bit more complicated.
“The recent pandemic and especially the closing of the Taiwan border gave us the push we needed to move quickly into this online learning venture, and we are grateful to God for this.”
We are already talking about our next seminar, which we plan to run in Spring 2022 from April to the end of May. Several students that couldn’t get into this seminar will be doing the seminar at that time. If you have an interest in learning to create animated short films to bring the gospel to the world’s unreached people groups, consider joining us in 2022!
– Dave H.
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:
