Reaching 4/14ers through the Story of Jesus

4/14 Movement Vision: providing the SOJ to “every child (ages 8-14, who are old enough to understand it) in every nation and every language

August 14, 2011
By Reed Olson

Upon returning from the 4/14 Summit in NY last fall, I embraced the 4/14 Movement goals completely – as did all the 800 delegates from 75 nations – but I was left with the huge question: HOW would everyone share the Gospel with their nation’s 4/14ers?

The biggest challenge, in my mind, was that 4/14ers today are totally different from us adults when we were their age, in that today’s 4/14ers act, speak, dress and communicate completely differently. Today’s 4/14ers are very visual (given their use of PCs, the Internet, Facebook, video games, DVDs, etc….things we didn’t have when we were their age years ago) and they like to communicate with little text (i.e. we used books and then email years ago; today’s youth use Facebook and texting). So, the challenge was how to communicate the Gospel to today’s 4/14ers in a way that was both visual and used limited text, which grabbed and then held their attention long enough so that they would read the content and give the Holy Spirit the optimum opportunity to reveal the truth of the Gospel to them.

In response, we began field-testing the Action Bible – which we’d released just one month before I attended the 4/14 Summit in NY -- and we found that upon receiving it that the typical response of a 4/14 recipient was to spend hours and hours reading it in their rooms (including your granddaughter after I sent you a copy), something I have rarely seen with any other Christian resource in the 27 years I’ve been distributing foreign language Christian literature. We sensed, then, that the Lord’s anointing was on this publication in a unique way, as did you, which is why you then challenged me to “put it into the hands of every 4/14er in every nation and every language.” I loved your crazy-big vision, but putting a 750 page Action Bible into their hands would cost more money than Patrick Slim, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet had combined, so we compromised and produced the 16 page SOJ instead – which we can make for pennies apiece -- to communicate just the Gospel message in the same pictorial/limited text format as the Action Bible. Hence, the SOJ was born.

Spanish and English SOJ samples will be provided to each of the 1,000 delegates from 100 nations at the 4/14 Singapore Summit in September, wrapped in a promotional piece which will direct the recipients to a website (www.davidccook.org/soj) to inform them what we are making available to them for their national church networks in their languages in every nation, after which we believe requests will come in from many many places.

To date, the SOJ – which was first published in June, 2011, has been published in English, Spanish and Portuguese and has been provided to the following nations:

• English:
  • Tanzania: 60,000
• Spanish:
  • Nicaragua: 200,000
  • Guatemala: 550,000
  • El Salvador: 297,500
  • Requests have recently been received/will be served in:
    • Mexico: 1,000,000
    • Puerto Rico: 200,000
    • Bolivia: 200,000
    • Dominican Republic: 200,000
• Portuguese:
  • Requests have recently been received/will be served in:
    • Brazil: 2,500,000
• Discussions are underway to publish/provide the SOJ to the following nations/languages:
  • Russia (Russian)
  • Ukraine (Russian)
  • Moldova (Russian)
  • Belarus (Russian)
  • Myanmar (Burmese + possibly one or more Chin dialects)
  • Pakistan (Urdu)
  • Lebanon (Arabic)
  • Iraq (Arabic)
  • Egypt (Arabic)
• Confidential Unnamed Persecution Watch List Nations (2)

The 16 page SOJ content was taken from the 750 page Action Bible, BUT depending on the requesting country’s preference, we are able to custom-create an SOJ for their use of between 16-32 pages containing content from the Action Bible of their choosing that will speak best to their culture and generate the best possible reaction from the reader.

David C Cook shares your 4/14 Window Movement vision of providing the SOJ to “every child (ages 8-14, who are old enough to understand it) in every nation and every language.”

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