Mobile Phone-Empowered Ministry

Having short videos on my cell phone to Bluetooth has been a fantastic addition to my witness.  So I was glad to see this recent article in IJFM: The Little Phone that Could: Mobile-Empowered Ministry (HT: TH). 

Here is a nice quote for those expatriates who are content with owning a lame mobile phone (aka my wife):

What a strange world we live in, a world where we highly literate, technologically savvy expatriates who live and work with “backwards” illiterate tribal peoples find ourselves lagging years behind those same people in our use of portable communications and media technology. My western co-worker, for instance, still purchases his mobile phone on the basis of whether or not it has a built-in flashlight with little concern for the fact that the phone has no camera, memory, or Bluetooth connectivity (that’s not to say I haven’t often wished my phone had a flashlight too!). Meanwhile, the local youth among our people are trading in their phones every few months for the latest model and spend hours each day using them to view and send one another songs, videos, and poetry. This is not something unique to the people I work with—the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union estimates that there are now more than five billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide!

You need to get a phone that has Bluetooth capabilities- for Jesus!

How convenient would it be if the mobile phone you carried had a veritable toolbox of songs, poetry and/or videos that point to Christ and which you could share with people you came into contact with throughout the day?…  The great thing is that viewing and sharing photos, music, and videos on mobile phone is now so common among the people group I live among that whipping out my phone and sharing one of these video or audio files with them is completely natural!

Videos can make the gospel viral:

Missions strategists tell us that our outreach should be reproducible by those we are seeking to reach. The ubiquity of the mobile phone’s presence and Bluetooth phone-to-phone connectivity make mobile media ministry eminently reproducible. We simply send Bluetooth videos on to those interested in them and they can then replay them and show them to others. Those other people, in turn, can show them to their friends who in turn can send them on to their wider circle of friends. Rather than solely reaching our limited circle of acquaintances and friends, mobile phone media has the potential to reach thousands and even tens of thousands.

Bluetoothing is not a magic bullet that will start CPMs around the world- it’s just a tool that can be useful.  And by the way, the iPhone is only cool if you can Bluetooth from it.

From the conclusion:

Mobile phones are the most widely used media technology among the unreached today… Are we investigating the amazing new abilities that mobile phone technology brings to the table? Do we recognize that the mobile is the next generation of mass media subsequent to TV and internet, and that its abilities surpass those of the previous generations? Are we finding ways to use these new capabilities to spread the glory of God among the unreached? I challenge you to think strategically while acting quickly to harness the potential mobile phone outreach offers in bringing the gospel of Christ to the lost.

Here are a couple sites in Arabic that have good short videos:

• http://www.hikayaat.com/en/home (most universal files are “Other 3gp”)
• http://www.sabeelmedia.com

Here is a short English video for Muslims that is available for translation into any language.

Below is a Sabeel Media video on Jesus healing the man with a withered hand:

Stories of the Prophets Jesus اليد الذابلة والمسيح المنتظر from Sabeel Media on Vimeo.