MegaVoice for Discipleship

All over the world, discipling leaders and teaching new believers is a major need. MegaVoice players can contain hours of Biblical course content and practical teaching. The players are easy-to-navigate, and since they recharge by the light of the sun (or a lightbulb), a MegaVoice player can go to even the most remote location and enable long-term and sustainable training. They can be used continuously, thereby multiplying the efforts of workers.

One of the most effective examples of the use of MegaVoice players for discipleship comes from Thailand:

Summary: The Navigators have the Bible and a complete discipleship program on MegaVoice Ambassador players. They are training pastors who work among the Lisu people to use these tools to disciple the illiterate. This discipleship program is proving to be an effective means of growing the church in remote locations.

Case Study: Lisu Discipleship Program

Dedicated workers from Navigator’s have been toiling for years to reach the Lisu people originally of Tibet. They are now scattered throughout the hills of China, Burma and northern Thailand. They live in simple bamboo houses with dirt floors, and make a living from slash-and-burn farming and crafts. The Lisu traditionally worship their ancestors or hold to animist beliefs. Since the 1970s, attempts to evangelize the Lisu in Thailand have been relatively successful. Before this time, they had no written language and conveyed their history in the form of a song – one that could take a week to sing. This group is entirely dependant on stories and oral traditions to pass on life-saving knowledge from generation to generation.

Oral teaching through MegaVoice units is a very effective way of reaching the Lisu, and the distribution of discipleship material to those who have accepted Christ as their Savior is critical and timely. Without daily bible study and discipleship materials to help them grow, they stagnate and soon fall away.

The Navigator’s have begun a new initiative to give Western-trained Thai pastors an effective discipleship tool for reaching illiterate Lisu-speaking people in Thailand. Until now the pastors were trained in Bible Schools using traditional techniques that are applicable for literate learners – and those are the techniques that they use in their village churches. But they have been experiencing significant frustration at the fact that the people in their villages do not seem to understand their message and are not growing in Christ.

The Navigators program on MV units gives than an auditory interactive discipleship program in Lisu that they can use in small groups within their congregations. This gives people who cannot or will not read access to scriptures and Bible study techniques such as scripture memory, meditation, studying a passage of scripture, small group discussion, sharing their testimonies, presenting the gospel and listening prayer, along with passages of the Bible that they can study to help them grow in Christ. Instead of expecting people to learn to read if they want to learn more about God, the program takes the gospel and discipleship to the people where they are, using techniques that oral learners appreciate and understand.

Bibles for the World and The Navigators Ministry combined resources to produce a unique audio discipleship program for tribal people in south and central Asia. This blend of biblical texts and teachings allows an illiterate person to study the Bible just as a literate one would.

The project kicked off in July of 2006 with a training session for 50 pastors and lay people from four different language groups. First they were taught how to use MegaVoice units in a small group setting. At the time, the first of three discipleship sessions, containing 7 lessons, was loaded onto MegaVoice players and distributed among Lisu-speaking pastors. All conference attendees received 5 MegaVoice units to take back with them to their villages. In return, they made a commitment to train the users how to use the player and to return units for the next installment.

The response to this new approach to teaching the Word of God was astounding. Within weeks, several pastors reported that they had passed out the Ambassador players and more were urgently needed.

L, one of the pastors, had this report to share: ““We are following up on the people we have trained. Z, T and I went to a Lisu village with 130 families. They needed 5 more MegaVoice machines, but we only gave them 2. MegaVoice has helped them a lot, and been very effective.

I went by myself to another Lisu village where in the past, the people heard the Word of God one time a week from preaching. However, now with MegaVoice, they can hear the Word of God everyday. It has helped the people a lot, and they said that they need more machines. They really want to keep the MegaVoice machines with them. They also want the material in the Lahu language, for there are 1.5 million people to reach. MegaVoice is becoming very famous in China and Thailand.”