SAT-7 10th Anniversary Sees Personnel Expansion

|TOP|Interserve, an international and interdenominational fellowship of Christian professionals, has sent off some of their staff workers to work with the Arabic Christian television service provider SAT-7, which marked its tenth year anniversary 31st May 2006.

Now completing its first decade of Christian programming targeted to populations in the Middle East and North Africa, SAT-7 is on the brink of further expansion and new channel launches. The new avenues have called for a need for the recruitment of staff including the highly trained personnel Interserve provides.

John Kennedy, personnel director of Interserve USA, commented on the new partnership saying, "They've actually now broadened their footprint outside of the Arabic language to also begin doing programming for the Iranian Farsi speakers as well as Turkish speakers with ministries and programming that are a part of SAT-7 but kind of sister organizations and they're helping them get launched and off the ground," according to Mission Network News.

On the air 24-hours a day, SAT-7 broadcasts from different parts of the Arab world, including Lebanon and Egypt, serving with the primary vision of empowering the minority group of Arab Christians to contribute to the good of society. Interserve fits much of the need of the Arabic channel as it mobilises Christians from around the world to use their professional skills in the Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist worlds.

|AD|Both the need for workers and high costs to produce television programming pose as challenges to the 10-year-old channel, but Kennedy acknowledged SAT-7's effective work.

"They're doing a tremendous work," he commented. "Getting it out is one thing, but then responding to all those that do ask for resources or information or questions about who Jesus is [is another]. And just having the people both to handle the correspondence but then on the ground in those countries where those listeners come from that they can eventually connect to."

Despite challenges, SAT-7 plans to reach a wider audience such as Persian and Turkish viewers with new emergent technologies and other new avenues.

"Pray that they would not become weary in well doing," Kennedy said. "They're producing high-quality programming that presents the Gospel often very directly as well as sometimes very creatively and indirectly at different age levels.

“[Pray] that they would continue to be able to have that creativity and vision and energy that they need to keep doing that."






Audrey Barrick
Christian Today Correspondent