Global Report: Medium (Not So) Rare

by Kenneth D. MacHarg

Several decades ago, Max Atienza, administrative director of the Far East Broadcasting Company’s work in the Philippines, hosted a program at 7 a.m. on Sundays in the Tagalog language. One day Max visited the island of Mindoro and heard about a village of uneducated Mangyan people who listened to his program. He was curious and decided to visit them.

Several decades ago, Max Atienza, administrative director of the Far East Broadcasting Company’s work in the Philippines, hosted a program at 7 a.m. on Sundays in the Tagalog language. One day Max visited the island of Mindoro and heard about a village of uneducated Mangyan people who listened to his program. He was curious and decided to visit them.

Just as they started a service in his honor, a man stood up in front and said, “You are tuned to the stations of the Far East Broadcasting Company, DZAS, DZB2, and DZH6. The time is seven o’clock.” From this point they went on with their meeting in a normal manner.

“These . . . people had one of the (pre-tuned radios) and had listened faithfully to Max every Sunday morning,” stated Gleason Ledyard in his 1968 book, Sky Waves (Moody Press). “They had no pastor or teacher; they had no education. Since the program was preceded by a station break and a time check, they assumed that this was the way to start a gospel service!”

Not so ancient history. Christian radio broadcasting—whether over a local station or to a signal on the shortwave bands coming from halfway around the world—has had a powerful missionary impact for nearly seven decades. When missionary radio began in 1931, the process was simple. Buy a transmitter, construct some antennas, purchase or generate your own electricity, program the station. If the intended audience didn’t own radios, you built them and gave them away. To cover vast distances or penetrate inhospitable jungles, shortwave was preferred (although local AM and later FM became popular as well).

From the beginning, technology has driven much of missionary radio. Programming was easy; a piano or a few Christian albums, a Bible, and someone who knew how to preach were all that were needed. The challenge was to afford, locate, and ship the appropriate equipment to put the station on the air. Remote locations and harsh tropical conditions caused many a missionary broadcaster to dedicate a lot of time to improvising repairs and parts.

Early missionary broadcasting was done almost exclusively by expatriates grounded in theology and the Bible. In any case, the missionary church had few people qualified to preach and teach on the air.

Today the challenges are greater and more complicated. Technological changes are outpacing the ability of many missions to keep up or afford them and raising ethical questions of who will be able to hear Christian broadcasts—and who will be cut off. Christian radio has proliferated around the world, and indigenous churches are moving beyond those paternalistic days with their own ideas of how to reach the unsaved.

Tuning in to local radio. The last decade has forced missionaries and their organizations to confront the fast pace of technological change and to ask how best to reach the unreached in the next century. “Technological changes are coming thicker and faster than ever,” says London-based Andrew Steele, senior associate with the International Christian Media Commission and a former radio producer with HCJB.

In spite of nearly seven decades of relying on shortwave broadcasts, local radio is at the forefront of most missionary broadcasting efforts as the millennium approaches. “Two-thirds of what FEBC does is local broadcasting,” says FEBC’s Jim Bowman. “We are purchasing time on local commercial or government stations, encouraging local ownership. We are seeking a 50,000-watt (AM) license for Phnom Penh, Cambodia.”

HCJB’s Orbra Bliss agrees. “We (HCJB) support local broadcasting enthusiastically,” Bliss notes. “It is easier to tune, it sounds better, it can be programmed completely in the dialect of the local population.”

The expansion into local radio is especially obvious in Africa. “There has been an explosion in Africa over the past three to four years,” says Lee Sonius, director for sub-Saharan Africa for SIM and HCJB. “One reason is that more and more government stations are opening up with privatiza-tion, and there is a move to privately owned radiostations.”

With the emphasis on local radio, mission strategists have called into question whether the traditional method of missionary radio, large shortwave stations blanketing a region or the entire world with the gospel, is going to continue to be effective. Opinion is split.

“Information is local—that’s the bottom line. If you’re going to reach people today it has to be local,” says Larry Buckman, executive director of COICOM, the Latin American counterpart of National Religious Broadcasters.

Shortwave getting short shrift? While pointing to areas where shortwave will continue to be important, Steele says that “the challenge for missionary broadcasters in the next 10 years is, Are they willing to grasp the nettle and discontinue use of shortwave and put effort into more locally based activity?”

But others see a strong future for the international broadcasts. “Local radio is subject to the will of local government, it is only cost effective in urban areas, and requires technically capable people to be available in some form,” Bliss says. “This leaves most of the land area of the world reachable only via shortwave. The cost of direct satellite broadcasting will continue to drop, but it will be a long time before it truly reaches a mass audience. What it does pick up will be located mainly in Europe, North America, and some parts of Asia.”

Joe Hill, operations director for LeSea Broadcasting’s World Harvest Radio in South Bend, Ind., agrees. “We have to remember that shortwave is still the primary medium for a lot of countries in the world,” he said. “We can say that satellite is it, digital is it, Internet is it, but when you are talking about people in villages in Africa, for example, people that don’t have a tremendous amount of mass communication available to them other than shortwave radio, that still makes it a valid medium. We’re talking not just a handful of people, but millions of people.”

Hill says that he will not put a limit on the future of shortwave. “Some people put 10 years on it, but HCJB has been around since 1931 and is still there. I think shortwave has a long life ahead because you still have a lot of people (you) cannot reach in any other way.”

The real decision for missionary broadcasters is not one or the other, but how to utilize both most effectively. “Shortwave and local radio are complementary,” says William “Ted” Haney, who served with FEBC for many years and who now works as a consultant for HCJB and other organizations. “It should be a ‘both and’ situation.”

Technological, political considerations. “When digital signals come on board, shortwave will be something quite different than it is today,” Haney says. “The fading will be virtually eliminated. You will either be able to get much better coverage with the same transmitter power or you will get the same coverage with much less power. It will be very close in quality to what FM is today.”

Satellite delivery of programming to distant locations is also becoming more sophisticated, thus offering mission organizations wider opportunities. “Satellite relay will continue to become more economical, allowing programs to be produced anywhere and then transmitted from the most optimum site available,” says HCJB’s Bliss.

Politics can force the hand of broadcasters who find stations closed or missionaries blocked from regions previously open to Christian witness. “There are many countries in the world where you can broadcast locally today that will not be open to this one to five years from now,” Haney says. “In many places where one can be on a local station today, tomorrow, we and others will be on the outside looking in, just as we were five to 10 years ago. We are on the brink of seeing that in Russia and many CIS countries. Local stations in Muslim countries are particularly vulnerable.”

Letting the people do the talking. While mission agencies grapple with the technical side of their ministry, programming and audience are changing rapidly. One of the byproducts of localradio is that indigenous Christians are learning how to produce effective programming for their own communities. “You can use canned programs,” SIM’s Solnius says. “Western programs have their merit, but I am a strong believer in letting the people do the talking. Let it come from their own cultural background. Use a national speaker who knows the proverbs, the history, and knows how to speak to them. If it is in their mother tongue, it is a lot easier for them to relate.”

“Any shift (from international to local broadcasting) will place an increased emphasis on the need to design programs that are locally and culturally relevant,” says Steele. “Another challenge is whether the broadcasters will have the courage to encourage cooperating broadcasters (those who provide programs from countries such as the United States) and their own staff to avoid repackaging material from home on the assumption, for example, that an English program translated into Uzbek will be relevant for the Uzbek listeners.”

Robert Bernhardt, a Southern Baptist missionary on loan to Trans World Radio in Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles, says that TWR’s new Caribbean Gospel Network is “working very hard to sign on the very best evangelical communicators in the English-speaking Caribbean. We see the future of Christian broadcasting in this region as being much more culturally relevant. CGN offers an alternative to North American media saturation.”

Increasing competition will also prompt programmers to develop offerings to challenge and sustain listeners who have hundreds of television channels and a growing number of radio stations available to them.

The placement of transmitters in local communities has meant a major shift for broadcast missions. The issue is not only technical, but how to train local church leaders to use the medium effectively.

Buckman says that HCJB and its church training arm APOYO will be setting up media centers in Colombia, Peru, and northern Brazil. “Our goal is to train, offer technical assistance, information, and programming via satellite.”

In Africa, Solnius sees many training possibilities to help local church leaders grasp the new opportunities. “We need to teach Christians how to write, how to produce, how to catch the listeners, how to hook them at the beginning,” he said.

Technology gap. New developments raise new questions, however. Among them, Will the fascination broadcasters have with technology separate them from those unable to keep pace?

The International Telecommunication Union says that nearly two-thirds of the world’s households lack telephones. The majority of such connections are in 23 industrialized countries, where almost all homes have service, while in the rest of the world, only 16 percent of people have phones. While Monaco has 99 lines per 100 people, Cambodia has less than one line per 1,000 people.

These statistics have major implications for those considering replacing shortwave with satellite or Internet broadcasting. The cost of a satellite dish or computer connection is far beyond the means of those who today cannot afford a telephone or who never receive mail.

“Improved technology on the transmitting end will come rapidly; however, it will be limited on the receiving end by economic conditions,” Bliss says.

Broadcasters who concentrate on those with more sophisticated equipment will shut out poor and middle-income people, who can afford a $10 or $15 radio but not much more.

Ministry multiplication. However technology, politics, and programming lead, broadcasters say they are enthusiastic about the power of missionary radio.

“I am very excited and I see many possibilities in missionary radio work,” Solnius says. “Take a missionary couple struggling for years in a remote area of Guinea, working with the Fulani people, a very Muslim people group with very few converts. You put a radio program on, geared for Muslim people, an evangelical type of program, and you can reach thousands of people at one time and multiply the missionary’sefforts. You can reach people the missionary could not reach one by one.”

SIDEBAR
In 1985, Ron Cline, head of World Radio Missionary Fellowship, was putting together a message on the power of radio to transmit the gospel around the globe. (His ministry’s flagship station, HCJB in Quito, Ecuador, had been broadcasting around the world via shortwave for over half a century.) Cline noted the astounding fact that radio ministries potentially could reach 80 percent of the world’s population.

Then the question came to him, “What’s wrong with the whole world?” As Cline began to turn over in his mind all the standard reasons why this couldn’t be done, he says he unmistakably heard the Spirit of God tell him, “Well, I want the whole world to know. I will not be satisfied with 80 percent.”

For the next month those words haunted Cline. So he wrote out a commitment to provide every person on earth an opportunity to hear the good news in a language he or she could understand. Cline shared his vision with Robert Bowman, the founder of the Far East Broadcasting Company. Bowman replied, “You know, Ron, it’s amazing, but God’s been telling me the same thing.”

The next morning Cline shared his commitment with Paul Freed, the founder and president of Trans World Radio.

That day, September 10, the three men signed Cline’s commitment, called “World by 2000.” (Later, two other missionary broadcasters, SIM, and Words of Hope also signed up.) Under this unprecedented agreement, they aimed to “provide every man, woman, and child on earth the opportunity to turn on their radios and hear the gospel of Jesus Christ in a language they can understand so they can become followers of Christ and responsible members of his church.” It was a simple, yet staggering, goal. Today, 13 organizations are involved.

World by 2000 aims to provide a half hour a day of gospel programming for each of the world’s 372 “mega-languages” with a million or more speakers. Since its inception, the number of languages reached has increased from 170 to 274, representing an additional 468 million or so people who now, theoretically at least, can hear the Christian message on the radio. By the year 2000, approximately 97 percent of the world’s people are expected to have programming available in a language they can understand.

Ron Cline acknowledges that even as the World by 2000 broadcasters have made impressive strides (and continue to do so, completing programming in 10 to 15 “mega-languages” annually), the horizon continues to recede before them, as one language after another crosses the million-person threshold. But he isn’t depressed or frustrated.

“We can’t orchestrate when the Lord’s going to return anyway,” Cline said. “We’re doing our best and hope he’ll find us faithful when he comes. . . More people will hear the gospel of Christ today than at any time in the history of the world.”
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EMQ, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 344-349. Copyright © 1998 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

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