JESUS Film Project: 8 new translations allow God to talk to millions of people in their own language 'in amazing ways'
A huge door leading to the Gospel has been opened, and millions of people from South Asia who have never known Jesus Christ are finding out who the Son of God really is.
The opened door is provided by The JESUS Film Project, an organisation based in Orlando, Florida. The group recently announced that it has finished eight new JESUS Film translations representing 6.5 million people in South Asia, according to Mission Network News.
Speaking for The JESUS Film Project, Joe Class says their conservative estimate is that each of the eight translations could be seen by 70,000 people belonging to one language group.
All the eight language people groups got their own JESUS Film premiere last month.
"It was utterly amazing to go to this location and have community members from eight different language groups gathered together," Class says. "All of us thanked God for what He's done to dedicate these to God's glory. Our hope and our prayer is there would be transformation and [that] churches would be started as a result of this."
Class says God is using the JESUS Film to spread the faith "in amazing ways." He says some of the organisations that have partnered with them have reported that 70 percent of their church plants resulted from using the film in a particular region.
"If you look at the last hundred years and you see how much translation has been done, and then you look at the growth of the evangelical church over that same period, you see an incredible ramping up. There's just this incredible link between translation God's Word and the Gospel and churches being planted and people coming to Christ. It's an amazing phenomenon to be alive at this point in history and watch all this!" Class says.
The potential for spreading God's Word to more people worldwide has become even bigger since the organisation could now make film translations quickly. Class says the last eight JESUS Film translations for South Asia were finished in record time, too. It used to take The JESUS Film two to five years to complete. Now it takes a matter of weeks, Class says.
"With new software and new methodologies, we're able to maintain the Bible translation standards of excellence in terms of making each product accurate, understandable and clear; and we have done one in under six weeks. Most of them are taking generally a couple of months," he says.