Some of the best stories come when people see a gap in what could be done, and their first step is to say, “What can I do to help?”
That’s what happened in 1998, when David Palusky and a small team traveled into the Amazon rainforest of Peru. David responded to the struggles of the tribe that they visited by asking that same question: “What can I do to help?” When they found that the tribe was eager to hear God’s Word but had no context to understand Biblical cultures or history, they partnered with Wycliffe to translate the JESUS film into the unique language of this people group and show it in the remote village.
After the miraculous response to the film, David saw the struggle of bringing bulky and weighty projectors and generators deep into remote areas and decided to do something about it. With the help of his brother and an engineering background, David began Renew World Outreach. The organization still creates specialized projector and power equipment that can pack down into a backpack, so that people in remote areas can view and connect with Gospel films.
Software engineer Josiah recently came onto our podcast and shared some of his vision for ways these projectors could be used to bridge the divide between mass gospel proclamation movements and church planting movements. He shares how some people have used these two to benefit each other.
The problem is, Josiah says, that “getting the snowball moving for a church planting movement is difficult right at the beginning. It takes time to build relationship and to find seekers and to find people who are really hungry. But when people are empowered by a device like this projector to go into a community, to show a movie that raises questions about the Gospel . . . they can find a community, especially if it’s more rural, of the people who are really looking for the Gospel.” Those seekers can be grouped into simple churches that can jump-start the growth of disciple-making movements. In that way, this piece of specialized technology can be an invaluable tool to find the people who are already looking for Jesus so that they can be connected to discipleship.
One of Josiah’s partners experienced the development of this system in real time. This partner was working to show the Jesus film to everyone in Africa for years, with very little to show for it. “They hadn’t emphasized the long-term, slow, relationship side of things [so] it wasn’t really sticking.” So this group shifted. Instead of just presenting the gospel and moving on, they instantly connected people into Bible study groups that they connected with and discipled over time. With that investment came long-term, deeply planted churches that have a “heart and ideology for multiplication.”
Another person brought church planters with him to present the gospel with the projectors. Those volunteers would then move into the community and meet with everyone who had come to the event and was interested, planting the church from there.
“The projector is what I would describe as a funnel strategy,” Josiah says. In this case, showing Gospel movies to large groups is not about getting ”hands raised,” but instead “finding people who are interested, who are hungry.”
It can be difficult to gain traction to start a disciple making movement, especially in closed or remote locations. What creative ways could you use or invest in to help reach the people who long for Jesus?
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