Seven
are now in the hands of house-church leaders in a restricted-access country in
the Middle East! What are they? Something I have been dreaming about for a long
time—a complete personal library self-contained on a personal electronic
tablet.
For a number of years, I have been wondering how to
supply pastors, Bible students, and ministry leaders with access to books, commentaries,
Bibles, and other resources that are simply not available to them. I’ve met so
many in the Middle East, North Africa, and
sub-Saharan Africa who desperately want more training resources, but cannot get
them due either to cost or an inadequate supply of printed material.
Thanks to a great collaborative effort by a number of
friends, on August 1, I delivered seven Samsung Galaxy Tabs (tablets) to the
head of a ministry working with underground Christians in that country. Each is
completely equipped with a custom-designed library of resources for
house-church pastors—all in the local language! What a treat it was for me to
bring together content from the Digital Bible Society, special software
developed by MAF’s Learning Technology division, and generous funding from a Sunday
School class at First Evangelical Free Church, Fullerton, California, to make
this project happen.
When the Tabs where handed out at a special discipleship
training event in a neighboring country, the recipients were shown how they
could access such things as books on understanding Christianity by R.C. Sproul,
two complete Bibles, the MacDonald Bible commentary, a layman’s counseling handbook, a hymnbook, an audio
version of the New Testament, CDs of ethnic worship songs, and several
full-length videos, including the Jesus
Film, Jesus Story, and Magdalena.
Now my friend tells me he could easily use 200 more of the units for other house-church leaders in that same country! If that isn't enough, after showing demos of this eLibrary to church leaders in Congo DRC, I'm now receiving requests for the same sort of resource to be supplied to them, except in French, Lingala and Swahili.
I'm excited to see this dream come to fruition and hope more useful applications can be developed for it in the months ahead.
