Source: International Mission Board, September 15, 2015
“Jamilya” perches on a boulder, the highest spot on the mountain pass leading to her home beside a glacial lake. When she holds her cell phone just right, she gets a signal strong enough to call her family in the village five hours away.
“Rahat,” living in another isolated corner of Central Asia, doesn’t have running water, but he keeps a computer charged using a solar panel atop his family’s felt yurt. During his summer break from university, he spends evenings messaging his friends and watching pirated movies on the Internet.
Evan has spent the last 10 years trying to get the gospel to people like Jamilya and Rahat—Central Asians who are isolated behind physical, political, and spiritual barriers. For a long time he wondered, “Why isn’t something really cool happening?”
When two years ago, a co-worker showed him a website created for the purpose of making Scripture available in the language of the Central Asian people group Evan is trying to reach. To his surprise, the site was getting 1,000 hits a day.
By the end of the first year, nearly 25,000 Scripture downloads were recorded. Workers recognized they needed a full-time team comprised of members “passionate about seeing people get access to the Bible.”
Evan explained, “We aren’t using other evangelism tools; we are just connecting with people, trying to get them reading the Bible and then corresponding.”
“Our vision is that when people get access to God’s Word and begin reading it, that’s going to transform lives,” he said. “Cool things start to happen when people get access to God’s Word.”
And that’s exactly what Evan is seeing among this hard-to-reach people group.
» Read full story, which is quite encouraging. See also Short Films Open Hearts in the Middle East (The JESUS Film Project).