Lausanne World Pulse – Urban Articles – Media Evangelism among the Unreached

By Justin Long
February 2006 There is a downside to all this activity. Namely, that many people in the 10/40 Window are not being affected by these methods. Just because radio broadcasts are being aired doesn’t mean large numbers of people are listening to them. The same goes for satellite television, which is banned in some countries in the Middle East.

Suggestions for Reaching the Unreached Via Media

Here are two areas where I think we could do better:

1. The JESUS Film works among peoples that are not very media-savvy, but not as well in media-rich environments. World B (majority evangelized, minority-Christian) countries like China and India and even some countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia are becoming very media-savvy. Qatar, for example, is well-known as a media capital, and the latest DVDs are commonly found throughout Asia. The JESUS Film is, unfortunately, somewhat dated, having been filmed in the 1970s. In some cases it may be hard to get a young person today to connect with it. This is often the case with Christian films; I’ve watched some that were supposedly aimed at young people that unfortunately featured talking heads which gave long speeches of ten minutes or more. When videos focus on the same face in the same position for more than a minute or two, most viewers will lose concentration. We need new video approaches, but we should also concentrate on broadening the use of the JESUS Film among World A peoples who are not yet media-savvy and where film is something new and wonderful. There it will be most effective at communicating the gospel.

2. While there are exciting things going on with Internet Evangelism, it’s still evolving. We have to find new, innovative methods and mediums that will work in conjunction with print on the Internet. We need great bloggers who can attract people with their witty, powerful, insightful examinations of current situations, trends and explanations of the Christian faith (as C. S. Lewis once did). We need people who can develop innovative, faith-filled, dramatic/humorous video shorts that will be copied as widely as pornography (check out Google Video to see what’s popular, http://video.google.com/).

For all media, we need to more widely incorporate non-westerners. We need to be actively recruiting media-savvy young people who are familiar with the people being reached. Perhaps this could be a new “short-term” mission of the future—to put together a team that would develop good evangelistic media that could be released under an open-source license and would be free for copying. Perhaps such a “film camp” could be sponsored by organizations like Youth With A Mission (YWAM) or Campus Crusade for Christ (CCCI). The results could be useful resources that would spark prayer or be used in evangelism. The question is, Who will be willing to take up the challenge?