Evangelism
HCJB Radio Ministry Extends the Hands of Christ
By Stan Jeter
CBN News
CWNews.com–For decades, HCJB Radio has broadcast the Gospel message to the world by short-wave from the Andes Mountains in Ecuador.
But today, the ministry is riding the crest of a new wave of radio ministry. They call it radio-planting.
It's the process of providing local Christians with the equipment and training to start their own radio stations, empowering them to develop Gospel programming that's culturally appropriate, and much more effective.
HCJB President Dave Johnson says radio planting has radically changed the ministry's focus.
“The transforming concept for HCJB world radio was, 'We're going to let other people do radio,’” Johnson said. “We had run and operated our own things for so long. As you know in evangelical world, we want to control the theology, we want to control the salaries all of those things. But still, you have to let go. What we've seen is that God works in powerful ways. He's much more capable of producing fruit and knowing who the right people are.”
Like Radio Emmanuel in Kiev, Ukraine. Radio Emmanuel is a 500-watt FM station, and it is Ukraine's first 24-hour Christian radio station.
It is the result of more than five years of partnership between Emmanuel – a Kiev media ministry affiliated with the Christian Broadcasting Network – and HCJB Radio.
“I think that God deliberately sent HCJB Radio here with their great experience and their radio schools” a representative of Emmanuel said. “Many of our staff received their first knowledge of radio in those schools.”
In the days after it went on air in 2005, Emmanuel received thousands of calls of support and gratitude for the Gospel message. Sometimes radio-planting results in church planting. One example is one church planter on Sumba, Indonesia.
For centuries the people on this Island practiced spirit-worship. But that began to change when the ministry started a Christian radio station with HCJB. The church planter helped develop the programs. He gave out dozens of pre-tuned radios, fixed on the Christian station.
Soon entire families started giving their lives to Christ – including a village chief and his 100-year-old mother – resulting in a new congregation with more than 60 members.
Similar stories are happening all over the world. Today, HCJB supports more than 300 radio stations in more than 100 countries in Latin America, Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific. And they're broadcasting in more than 120 languages.
But radio planting helped revolutionize HCJB in another way, by helping the ministry discover that it takes more than just voices to spread the Gospel. It's shown them that it also takes hands.
From the beginning, HCJB has had a health care ministry through its hospital and mobile health clinics in Ecuador. But when it started radio-planting, the ministry stumbled upon an eye-opening phenomenon.
“It was really interesting that as we planted radio stations, for example in Africa, that in many of those places a clinic would spring up two years later,” Johnson said.
It happens because the stations are trying to bless their communities. They found that one of the best ways is to broadcast information about healthcare. That often leads to the establishment of a medical clinic.
For one radio planter in a Muslim area of Africa, it opened the door to a better relationship with his neighbors.
“He began using the radio to help the community understand when the doctors and nurses would be arriving,” Johnson said. “That turned the whole Muslim community around who had been very antagonistic before, to being very positive because they recognized that this pastor wanted to serve the community.”
Because of this powerful impact, HCJB Radio is putting more resources into its clinics, hospitals, and traveling clinics. The ministry has even altered its name. In 2007 it became HCJB Global, with HCJB Voice for the radio ministry, and HCJB Hands for health care.
Johnson says it's something only God could have orchestrated.
“And so we slowly began to realize that maybe radio is the voice that communicated the love of Christ,” he said. “But a hospital was certainly the hands that communicated the love of Christ. And we realized that God had given us a holistic ministry, even without necessarily planning it out that way, just because we were trying to meet people's needs.”
Their success demonstrates that even a radio ministry sometimes has to use more than just words to show God's love.
Visit the HCJB Global Web Site
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