Satellites Allow Gospel to be Heard in Arab World

A recent article from Assist News Service features an evangelistic ministry set up for the Arab World-Arab Vision. By satellite broadcasting, the Gospel is being brought to millions of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa everyday.

The Middle East and North Africa are often labelled by missionaries as unreached countries nowadays because of the predominated Muslim community. In fact, many early churches of the apostles were established in these regions. There are still millions of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa but they have become a minority amongst the 240 million Arabs. Arab Vision exists to support these Christians by providing spiritual resources and to let the message of Christ be heard in the society.

"Many Arab Christians desire to heed the call of Christ to proclaim the Gospel and live its consequences. As the Word of God speaks to the whole person and to all mankind, many Arab Christians are eager to teach and live this Word of God in its entirety, in their individual lives, in the life of the church, and in all society," Arab Vision confessed.

Arab Vision begun the ministry with Gospel TV programmes in the Middle East. Since September 2003, it has further pioneered the vast land of North Africa and the penetration from satellite broadcasting has proved to be very high.

"The Arabic dialects and the cultures in the regions are significantly different. Our choice was firstly to start in Algerian Arabic and the Kabyle Berber language, because the number of Christian believers in Algeria has grown explosively," writes Harvey Gutter, Arab Vision Office.

It is reported that the openness for the Gospel in Algeria is amazing. 40,000 ex-Muslims have become followers of Christ and gathered publicly.

In collaboration with Arab World Ministries (AWM) in Marseille, France and with Gospel missionary Union (GMU) in Malaga, Spain, Channel North Africa (CNA) is broadcasting 4 hours per day of evangelistic TV programs produced by Arab Vision.

"These programs are made with ex-Muslims who became followers of Jesus. They speak in their native languages of Moroccan and Algerian Arabic and in Kabyle Berber about their new faith. Never before have North Africans been able to watch people from their own countries on television confess their Christian faith on this scale," the website said.

More than half of all inhabitants of North Africa can receive these programs on TV at home. The response from the audience has been very active, according to CNA. Due to the rising response from Morocco, Arab Vision has developed Moroccan programs as well.

So far, 30 talk shows were produced with several Moroccan Christians in Malaga, Spain. Another 60 programs in the Moroccan Arabic dialect are expected to be produced by January 2005 in the Gospel Missionary Union (GMU) studios. Arab Vision has also considered opening small production studios in Tunisia and Morocco.

Gutter says, "In Morocco we are going to take concrete steps to start our own production facilities. In our programs we want to show that the Christian faith is not a foreign religion but that it originated in 'the Arab world'. We also want to show that there are Christian believers in North Africa and that they have not become betrayers of their own country."

Arab Vision explained that at least half of all Arabic-speaking people are functionally illiterate. In cultures where literacy is low and reading is not common, video is an excellent educational tool.

In addition, even though many Arab families are extremely poor, almost everyone has a television. In many Arab countries the skyline is mushrooming with satellite dishes. God seems to have opened the door for the evangelism in these unreached countries through satellite broadcasting, and now millions of people throughout the whole Arab World are able to watch Christian programming on national television.

However, there is in fact a tremendous lack of Christian programs in Arabic as not many ministries in the world are specialised in this aspect. Arab Vision is now calling for prayers and financial support for the ministry, especially for the Morocco development project.

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