Why are all of these people smiling so big? 

Last week 3 of our teammates (see Mark, Kay and Karin below) traveled to Ghana and Kenya to “train the trainers” in the launch of a mobile phone based Bible leadership project.

The smiling gentlemen you see here are holding their training certificates after mastering the skills needed to install specific Bible software on mobile phones and administrate Bible leadership courses for hundreds of eager students in their own countries.

Yesterday we showed you a video presenting a quick overview of the project – called “Pastors Training in Leadership (PTL)”

Purpose of PTL:

Pastors Training in Leadership (PTL) is a three level series of courses on a mobile phone designed to equip pastors for church planting. Created by the Nairobi International School of Theology in Nairobi, Kenya, these courses provide theological training for pastors and lay church leaders.  Church growth in this area of Africa is happening at an exponential rate – and there is a drastic short supply of trained pastors.  Many congregations share a lay pastor – a “normal” church member who serves 2 or 3 churches while maintaining a full time job in his community.

PTL exists to provide the theological training pastors need to plant churches across the African Sahara Belt (Senegal to Somalia). Each of the PTL Coordinators are responsible to recruit pastors in their country and then encourage, mobilize, and energize them to go north to the Sahara Belt and plant churches, where the Lord is adding many to His church.

Prayer Requests:

• Ask God to protect each of these leaders whom our teammates served last week, who will in turn train many others to conduct the Bible training courses in their own countries.
• Pray that the Nairobi International School of Theology - creators of the course contents and curriculum – would quickly be able to translate their curriculum into French and other languages.  Many countries in Africa are waiting for this training, but need to have it in their own language.
• Ask the Lord to provide a mobile phone for each lay pastor who wants to take the course.  Smart phones are readily available in most cities, but must be purchased and cared for.

Praise for all the Lord Did Last Week:

• 28 trained church leaders were trained and certified for the roles of Technical Coordinator and PTL Coordinator representing 10 countries – from Ethiopia to Ghana to Swaziland to Zimbabwe.  Praise the Lord!
• Faith goal: 2,400 lay pastors equipped to plant churches in the Sahara Belt starting this year!

Recent quote:

“This is a tool that will help me raise an army from all across the nation; an army of like-minded people who will take the gospel to the rest of the world. In our effort to mobilize the mobilizers, we now have a simple tool that gives us that platform and a launchpad to missions.” – Abel Zulu, lay church leader in Zambia

We implore you to watch this video describing one of the projects our team is involved with – representing several evangelical groups in Africa and Orlando.

Emmanuel is a pastor and seminary professor in Kenya.  He faces a difficult challenge – one which most pastors in America would love to have!  With more than 20,000 new churches in his part of the world, Emmanuel’s seminary in Kenya cannot effectively equip all the pastors needed to lead these new churches.

Brad is a lay pastor who lives in a rural environment, similar to most of the lay pastors who need this training. He lives in neighboring Tanzania, and it takes him an hour to drive from the closest paved road to his village of 2,000 people. He runs his refrigerator on a kerosene engine, collects rainwater for drinking, and he uses solar panels to provide electricity. Yet he has mobile phone coverage at his house. There is a solution to Emmanuel’s challenge. We can now provide life-changing Biblical training to Africans like Brad, all delivered on a mobile phone!

See the video above to learn more.

A couple of days ago three of our teammates returned to Orlando from Africa where they trained almost 30 lay church leaders to conduct their own Bible training courses via mobile phone.  Hopefully I can share the praise report and prayer requests from this trip tomorrow in another blog post.

16 + 1 = 17.  I am one of the 17.  Are you?

By far, the YouVersion Holy Bible App was my favorite, most frequently used “app” on my mobile devices in 2011.  Most likely, it will be my most frequently used app in 2012 too.

Watch this great video from YouVersion to learn more:

YouVersion.com offers a free Bible reading app for most smartphones. Read the Bible in your own language, using a Bible reading plan or even listen to the Bible as it is read to you.  Since I rarely go anywhere without my mobile phone these days, YouVersion has made my phone my “first stop” in connecting with The Word.  Honestly, it has helped me read the Bible more regularly than ever before.

As of late last year, about 1 in every 17 iPhone and Android owners had installed a copy of the Bible app on their phones.  That’s well over 30 MILLION people worldwide.  30 Million!!  And millions more are reading the Bible on their computer via YouVersion.com – the web site version of the app.  (No, you don’t have to own an iPhone or Android to take advantage of their reading plans).

This is phenomenal.  Think about this huge number of people who are reading God’s living and active Word daily on their phones.  However, the statistic above also indicates that 16 out of 17 iPhone and Android owners have not yet installed the Bible.

What if every person who has installed this app – containing the living Word of God – could find 16 other people who don’t have it yet and let them know about it?

“Nice phone.  Do you like it?  What are your favorite apps?  Can you show me?  … Do you have the Bible on your phone?  Honestly, it’s my favorite app.  Yep, the Bible is an app!  Want to try it?”

I can easily imagine this conversation unfolding with people I rub shoulders with.

My teammates and I are very excited about the YouVersion vision.  We have several projects this year which will be focusing on leveraging the rapid power of mobile platforms for discipleship.

Watch the Video

Check out more at theother16.YouVersion.com.

The Lord is using Bible reading and the explosion of mobile devices for such a time as this!

What happens when 170 creative volunteers and staff from 32 countries gather in one place for three days to answer the following question? ….

How do we leverage the huge opportunities of the internet to deliver the timeless, unchanging message of Christ in fresh, changing ways?

Earlier this month, my team from Orlando helped host this major conference in Bangkok, Thailand.  Even amidst terrible flooding in the country, our gathering was a major success – thanks to God.

“Bangkok or Bust: Campus Crusade Talks Tech Amidst Historic Thailand Floods“ was the article the Christian Post e-zine wrote detailing.  You can check out the article here.

Ideas that Ship:

One of the unique of our conference was spending two hours each morning in small innovative workgroups. Each workgroup made a plan to solve a problem or develop an innovative approach to moving people from making a decision, to being a disciple of Jesus. At the end of the conference, each group presented their proposed solution as a video.  The best solutions will receive seed funding to develop a prototype.

Imagine the power of 170 people returning home to 32 countries with new strategies, new passions, new relationships with like-minded digital ministry entrepreneurs! This is our dream becoming reality.

So, like FedEx, our goal for each workgroup was NOT simply to talk about ideas, but to DELIVER an idea that could work.  You can see each of the videos of proposed solutions here on YouTube.

Would you also like to know more about the diverse projects in internet ministry happening in Campus Crusade for Christ? Visit the MinistryNet Conference Virtual Ministry Fair.

This is the conference I am heading to in Bangkok.  I had an unplanned 24 hour delay in Detroit, but Lord willing I will still get there just a few hours before some of the pre-conference seminars begin.

Click the photo above or visit the conference web site:  http://MinistryNetconference.com

You may even be able to watch streaming video from some portions of the conference.

Here is an interview with my director regarding who is coming and what we hope to accomplish.

This video says it all.  Yet, it’s probably nothing you didn’t already know.

Why and how is mobile technology important to ministry today?

It’s so important that we’ve spent over a year helping a seminary in Kenya offer a Bible class to student pastors via mobile phone.  Others in our ministry have created iPhone Apps such as God Tools and Heart Mirror – excellent little tools to help you engage people in conversations about God.

We want to go where the people are.  And people are “on” their mobile devices.

Take a look at the video and consider the opportunities of using mobile for helping make disciples who can simply make other disciples.

Q:   What steps would you take first to help make disciples who make other disciples using mobile technology?

Our culture loves movies.

I’ve posted previously about the Global Short Film Network – an amazing new start-up ministry within Campus Crusade for Christ International.

Cooperating filmmakers worldwide post their short movies to GSFN’s web site.  Most films are less than 10 minutes in duration and all are “clean” and have some thread or angle which relates to spiritual topics.

The beauty is that you can download many of these movies to your iPhone, iPad or mobile device. What then?  Watch them merely for your personal entertainment?  Yes, but more importantly you can share them with people who yet to know Christ.  It even could be effective as a new form of street evangelism: find some young people hanging out at a park, bus stop or campus and ask if they will give you their opinions on a new movie.  Let them watch it and then ask, “How do you think this movie represents God? … Does this movie make you think differently about God? … How do you see yourself in this movie?  … Do you think most people think like or act like the people in this movie in relation to their spiritual beliefs?”

Don’t have an iPhone or mobile device capable of playing movies?
Then why not invite over a small handful of pre believing friends to watch a few of the films on your DVD player at home?

The scoop:

If you can not see the video above, try this link.

Ever noticed a little “translate” button like this on a web site?

Soon you’ll see more and more sites offering multiple language translations.

Think of the implications of this in a web site offering Bible verses or Bible Studies, for example.  Or an online discussion board about God which draws visitors from many countries.

Watch this video to learn the amazing way God is “lining things up” with many, many organizations cooperating with Google to help make machine translation sufficient for basic web reading, if not beyond sufficient to “excelente!”

Machine Translation = Language translation done on the fly by a computer. Up until very recently, the quality of machine translation was considered very poor.  There are just so many exceptions in language and grammar rules, that computers could not understand and contextualize translation jobs like the human brain does so well.  But, things are changing rapidly.  Watch the video. Pretty cool indeed.

Here is the direct link to the video.

To learn more and to try it out for yourself, visit Translate.google.com

Last weekend when we received some urgent email prayer requests from our teammate Jerry, who is in Kenya launching a new project, we asked you to pray.

As you may remember, our team has been working for months on a very exciting opportunity using mobile phone technology to offer seminary courses to help train pastors in Kenya.

In sub Sahara Africa, church growth is exploding, yet there are extremely few trained pastors.  Additionally, seminaries in Africa often can not train enough students nor can the students afford to travel to the seminaries to take the Bible courses.

So, a forward thinking Nairobi seminary decided to offer distance education via cell phone. They are trying it out for one course this semester and hope to expand it in the spring.  To learn the details of how the seminary course will work, read the short explanation on our teammate Jerry’s web site.

Although there have been numerous big problems in launching this seminary project, the class started Monday.   A full slate of eager Kenyan students received their phones pre-loaded with the course material and software to administer their quizzes and facilitate class discussions via text messages. Now the students will return to their homes scattered around Kenya – allowing them to work during the semester and to continue serving in their churches.

Here’s a recent update from Jerry:

“Today we completed the first mLearning Class introduction. In addition to the approx 30 students pre-registered, there were 10 students who registered and paid within one hour of the beginning of class.

Class Observations:

• Overall I think the day was successful. Students ended the day excited about what they were beginning and grateful for the opportunity to participate in this. No one was frustrated. At least no one expressed frustration. We have a lot we can improve, but I think we made a good start today!

• The coursework software required data service which we provided via WiFi (wireless Internet), but during that time some students started browsing on the Internet, not realizing that they were  accessing the Internet. I don’t think any of the students understood what data service is and what applications on the phone required it. None of them understood what WiFi was or what you would use it for. It would be much easier if we could block all the services that require data access and only show them if data is turned on.
• The average student was able to learn the basics soon enough, but with some more guided/restricted training it could have gone faster. Students who had no previous experience with technology took longer to get familiar with the OS.
• Pastor Robert Murari (to whom we gave a phone) called just before class started and said the video playback was failing on his phone. I promised him a replacement memory card. This confirmed our fear that the locally purchased memory cards were of insufficient quality to work.
• Some felt comfortable and made quick progress. Others were writing down instructions on paper for the most basic operations at the end of the day.
• One of the pastors said he did not have electricity at his house and that charging the phone might be a problem.

Returning to the seminary was much more of a problem for the students than loading more airtime credit. Most of the pastors were from places far from Nairobi.”

Quick update on David’s trip to Canada:

Thank you so much for praying.  I had a very fruitful time.  Shannon and the kids managed well while I was gone but as always it’s much better to be back under one roof.

Here are a few photos from the conference at Columbia Bible College – in British Columbia, that is   Directly below is the Canadian “Ops Team” – about nine full time staff devoted to providing operational excellence for all of their campus missionaries.  In total, Campus for Christ Canada has about 160 staff on campus.

Joshua Wong is one of the trainers on the Ops Team.  He facilitated several excellent seminars on Social Media, Team Collaboration and Digital Basics.

We learned so much!!  The teams in Canada are trusting the Lord for huge things.  It was great to see them so eager to share ideas.  They’ve really created a good learning environment for their teams.

Want to hear some of their secrets? I made a short list of their good habits – very simple stuff which could help any team!  See the short list here.

I’ve also posted a video clip.  See it here.

We spent part of one day sightseeing.  See these photos here.