The Lord of the Harvest is raising up laborers from His harvest on every continent to reap the remaining harvest among least reached people groups. This is an epic moment in church history! We are witnessing an unprecedented season of harvest among the unreached with movements of multiplying fellowships well beyond the 4th and 5th generations. Now over 1% of the world’s population are experiencing these movements of God’s Spirit. Over 85% of new disciple making movements are started by existing movements. How should this affect our ministry strategy?
Nearly two and a half years ago, during a time of prayer with a dear colleague, the Lord impressed upon our hearts to birth a new vision and network we now call, “Media4Movements”. We learned about what God was doing in movements among the Unreached using media, arts and technology. Our hearts burned with excitement and a sense of privilege that the Lord would call the three of us to commit our lives to this endeavor.
Today, Media4Movements (M4M) is serving local disciples inside movements to strategically plan, imagine, create and distribute their own media. We envision movement leaders at many levels discovering new ways to use media, technology, and the arts to grow and accelerate their movements! We serve both existing and emerging movements as they seek to develop and apply new tools and skills to amplify their reach among their own people and other unreached peoples.
Recently, Pedro a movement leader in Mozambique working with a Muslim people group discovered the potential of using a combination of media and technology to overcome the challenges of Covid-19 in his church planting ministry. Because of the pandemic restrictions his disciples were not able to travel often to reach the most remote villages. After spending several media coaching sessions with representatives from Media4 Movements, while in prayer Pedro received an innovative idea. He was reminded how youth in his people group would use their phones and bluetooth speakers to listen to their favorite music. The Lord gave him the idea to use cheap phones that could be used to link to bluetooth speakers and provide a way for him and his disciples to run Discovery Bible Studies remotely. The phones were also used to distribute the first ever worship songs produced by the new believers from this Muslim people group. The experiment was a great success, and they saw 300 Muslims in a village 100 kilometers away come to Christ.
Our Media4Movements partners where able to raise enough finances to enable Pedro to purchase 50 sets of these phones and speakers, and distributed them to several of his disciple makers. Within one month they had seen three whole villages of Muslims come to Christ, and many of them baptized. An Imam (Muslim Priest) from one of these villages who himself had become a follower of Jesus asked one of Pedro’s disciples, “May we use the Mosque in our village to have our church services? No one wants to use it because they have all become believers in Isa al Masih (Jesus Christ).” As the movement grows, mosques are closing!
God helped them to use appropriate technology and media that was simple, affordable, reproducible, and multi-lingual to spark a movement of multiplying fellowships among the most remote and unreached peoples of Africa.