Church team to deliver audio Scripture players

SOLOLÁ — Next week a U.S. church team will deliver precious cargo here: Six audio-Bible “Proclaimers” and some audio testaments on digital discs in the local Mayan language, Western Kaqchikel.

About the size of a loaf of banana bread, each Proclaimer has a dramatized recording of God’s Word embedded on a digital chip and can be powered by the sun, an outlet or a hand crank.

By accident, I recently learned about a program which provides free audio Scriptures. The “Every Church, Every Village,” program sponsored by Albuquerque, N.M.-based Faith Comes By Hearing, offers up to six Proclaimers and a number of compact discs in MP3 format.

Sandy Jackson, who provides customer service at Faith Comes By Hearing, explained the program to me and sent out a shipment, delivered here by last week’s church team from the St. Louis church, South County Christian Center.

This week, Sue Hoiland with Lampeter United Methodist Church in Lancaster County, Penn., agreed to bring a shipment with her team, which flies here July 25. Sue and her husband, Paul, lived and worked 20 years in Sipacapa, Guatemala as Bible translators, working on the Sipacapense translation. Sue and her daughter, Heidi, who was born here, will be on the team of eight people. Sue was a bit overwhelmed, I think, with all the things we were sending her way for delivery down here, but she graciously agreed to help us out and load their bags even heavier.

I was worried we might be too late for the audio Scriptures to reach Pennsylvania in time, but Sandy assured me it wasn’t a problem.

“It takes a couple of hours” to load the Scriptures onto the Proclaimers’ chips, he told me Tuesday. “If we need to get them out the same day, we can get them out the same day. Technology’s come a long way.”

Until now, audio Kaqchikel Scriptures had only been available here on cassette tapes. A number of our staff have the tapes, but they don’t use them. They say the 90-minute tapes wear our their cassette players.

When I handed out audio Scriptures on MP3 discs to our Kaqchikel staff members last week they reacted with surprise and delight: “Where did you get this?” “Is this in Kaqchikel?”

Please pray for God’s blessing on the audio Scriptures, that they may bless and edify local Mayan believers.

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These photos demonstrate how much more compact the MP3 CDs are when compared to the cassette-tape version of the audio New Testament. The photos of the Proclaimer above, demonstrate its flip-up solar panel and hand crank, which folds down. For a cool 360-degree view, go to this link and drag the sliding dot to spin the machine.