The Incredible Power of the Jesus Film

The most recent issue of Mission Frontiers, the publication of the US Center for World Missions, included an article on the amazing effects of the Jesus Film, which I reproduce below. The entire issue was great; I was especially fascinated by Ralph Winters article on "The Future of Evangelicals in Mission." Follow the links and you will not be disappointed.

By Rick Wood

In the history of the modern mission movement,few organizations have succeeded as brilliantly
as The Jesus Film Project. Started in 1980 as an evangelistic effort of Campus Crusade for
Christ using a recently released film called the Jesus Film, which chronicles the life of Christ from the Gospel of Luke, its efforts have gone from simply amazing to astounding and earth shaking.

For at least a decade or two it has remained the most translated and viewed film in the history of film making. When we featured the Jesus Film and its mind boggling goals in the November-December 1997 issue of Mission Frontiers, they had translated the film into 419 languages and had exposed the film to over one billion people. Now as of the end of June 2007, they have translated the film into over 1,000 languages and achieved the incredible
milestone of exposing over 6.2 billion to the film with some having seen it more than once. The one million speakers of the Lanka Kol language of India are the recipients of the 1000th translation of the Jesus Film.

Even more significant is that over 201 million people have committed their lives to Christ as a result of viewing this film and hundreds of thousands of
new churches have been established...

Steve Steele, formerly of the DAWN Movement which promotes church planting has said, “Of the 1 million churches started in the last decade (1992-2002) 75 percent used the Jesus Even more significant is that over 201 million people have committed their lives to Christ as a result of viewing this film and hundreds of thousands of new churches have been established...

It took 17 years from 1980 to 1997 for the Jesus Film Project to reach 419 translations and one billion viewers. In just the last 10 years they have completed over 581 more translations and reached an additional five billion viewers. This is just the beginning of their plans to plant churches and expose as many as possible to the life saving message of the gospel of Christ.

In terms of translations, their ultimate goal is to translate the film into the heart language of every person. But their intermediate goal is to translate the Jesus Film into every language with over 100,000 speakers. Th ere are currently around 1,500 such languages, so the Jesus Film is two-thirds of the way towards that goal. With a new translation completed almost once a week, they should reach this goal within the next 10 years.

The accomplishments of the Jesus Film Project are not theirs alone. They would be the first to admit that. Their success has been largely due to the strategic partnerships that the Jesus Film Project has built with hundreds of mission and church organizations around the world. Currently they have active partnerships with 1,500 organizations that are using the Jesus Film
in their evangelism and church planting efforts. The film is shown to people around the world in some of the most remote locations by thousands of teams of missionaries and volunteers. The success of the Jesus Film is really the success of the global church in coming together to use an effective media tool.

...As the Jesus Film approaches the end of its third decade of ministry, its leaders recognize that they need to adapt the film to the needs of an increasingly sophisticated media audience,
especially in Western countries. The younger generation of 15-25 year olds will likely need new versions of the film in order to communicate the message of the gospel to them in a meaningful
way. This will involve the creation of completely new films in order to reach this and following generations of young people. The focus is not on the Jesus Film itself. It is merely a tool. The focus is the development and distribution of the most effective media tools to communicate the gospel to various types of audiences. One size or tool does not fit all.

...The Jesus Film Project is always looking for new ways to convey the message of the Jesus Film and the gospel. Currently, the Jesus Film is available to view online in any of 800 different
languages. You can also download segments of the film onto your iPod for on-the-go viewing. As technology and the mission of the Church around the world advances, you can be assured that the Jesus Film Project will be actively involved in helping to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to every tribe and tongue.

Second Temple Quarry Found

Report: Herod's Temple quarry found

By SEAN GAFFNEY, Associated Press Writer Mon Sep 24, 8:00 AM ET

JERUSALEM - Israeli archaeologists said they have discovered a quarry that provided King Herod with the stones he used to renovate the biblical Second Temple compound — offering rare insight into construction of the holiest site in Judaism.

The source of the huge stones used 2,000 years ago to reconstruct the compound in Jerusalem's Old City was discovered on the site of a proposed school in a Jerusalem suburb.

Today, the compound Herod renovated houses the most explosive religious site in the Holy Land, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims.

"This is the first time stones which were used to build the Temple Mount walls were found," said Yuval Baruch, an archaeologist with the Israeli Antiquities Authority involved in the dig. Quarries mined for the massive stones, each weighing more than 20 tons, eluded researchers until now, he said Sunday.

Baruch said coins and pottery found in the quarry confirm the stone was used during the period of Herod's expansion of the Temple Mount in 19 B.C.

But researchers said the strongest piece of evidence was found wedged into one of the massive cuts in the white limestone — an iron stake used to split the stone. The tool was apparently improperly used, accidentally lodged in the stone and forgotten.

"It stayed here for 2,000 years for us to find because a worker didn't know what to do with it," said archaeologist Ehud Nesher, also of the Antiquities Authority.

Nesher said the large outlines of the stone cuts indicated the site was a massive public project worked by hundreds of slaves. "Nothing private could have done this," Nesher said. "This is Herod's, this is a sign of him."

Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. Herod's most famous construction project was the renovation of the Temple, replacing a smaller structure that itself replaced the First Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.

Stephen Pfann, president of the University of The Holy Land and an expert in the Second Temple period, said the discovery was encouraging.

"It would be very difficult to find any other buildings in any other period that would warrant stones of that size," said Pfann, who was not involved in the dig. He said further testing of the rock is necessary to confirm the findings.

The Second Temple was leveled by Roman conquerors in A.D. 70. The Western Wall, the holiest prayer site for Jews, is the best known surviving remnant.

Atop the adjacent compound, where Jews believe the Temple once stood, now stand two of the holiest sites in Islam, the al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-capped Dome of the Rock.

The site is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with both sides claiming the area.

Israel captured Jerusalem's Old City from Jordan during the 1967 Mideast war. While retaining security responsibility for the site, Israel allows Muslims to handle day-to-day responsibilities there.

"And that is what some of you were" (1 Corinthians 6:11)

The Bible clearly tells us (see reference above) that people can be delivered from same-sex attraction affliction. New research backs that up. From Crosswalk.com...

Changing Sexual Orientation Is Possible, New Research Says

Randy Hall

Staff Writer/Editor

(CNSNews.com) - The results of a three-year study challenge the idea that homosexuals cannot change their sexual orientation and that attempts to do so are harmful. But an opponent of "ex-gays" dismissed the findings as the result of "a deceptive sham" perpetrated by "right-wing therapists."

While writing their book, "Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation," researchers Stanton Jones of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., and Mark Yarhouse of Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., chronicled the experiences of 98 people who contacted Christian ministries in an attempt to become heterosexuals.

"What we found by following these subjects over time is that not everyone is successful, not even a majority is successful, but a very substantial group of people report fairly dramatic change," Jones said while discussing the research during the annual conference of the American Association of Christian Counselors last Thursday in Nashville, Tenn.

"Fifteen percent of our sample of about 100 claimed to actually have changed from homosexuality to heterosexuality," said Jones. "It needs to be said that this process is not like flipping a light switch. Life is still complicated for these people, and some still have some residuals of their homosexual attractions."

"However, they report being able to function as heterosexuals, they're happy with their marriages, and they feel that their lives have changed dramatically," he said.

The study also examined the question of whether or not attempts to change were harmful to the subjects.

"We administered a standard psychological inventory that measures distress to our subjects at every point along the way," Jones said, adding that they found that there was "essentially no change" in the participants' emotional well-being.

Because both of them are from Christian colleges, Jones and Yarhouse addressed skeptics of religious researchers who deal with matters of science.

"We are evangelical Christians committed to the truth-seeking activity of science," they said in a joint statement.

"In conducting and reporting this study, we took seriously the words of one of our heroes, C. S. Lewis, who said that science produced by Christian persons would have to be 'perfectly honest. Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly,'" the researchers said.

Initial reaction to the research has varied dramatically along social and cultural lines.

Alan Chambers, an ex-homosexual who serves as president of the Christian ministry Exodus International - which was the source of many subjects in the study - praised the survey. In a Friday news release, he praised the work as "the first longitudinal, peer-reviewed, scientific research of its kind on this topic to date."

"Finally, there is now scientific evidence to prove what we as former homosexuals have known all along - that those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attraction can experience freedom from it," Chambers said. "For years, opponents of choice have said otherwise, and this body of research is critical in advancing the national dialogue on this issue."

Mat Staver, president of the Christian group Liberty Counsel, said in a news release of his own that the study is "groundbreaking" and would have "profound reverberations for counselors."

"The debate about homosexuality has too often been driven by political rather than scientific considerations," said Staver. "The American Psychological Association (APA) and other, similar organizations may no longer silence dissent."

The APA responded to the research by pointing to a recent statement made by the organization on its Web site: "Efforts to repathologize homosexuality by claiming that it can be cured are often guided not by rigorous scientific ... research, but sometimes by religious and political forces opposed to full civil rights for gay men and lesbians."

However, former APA President Nicholas Cummings praised the research methods of Jones and Yarhouse. "This study has broken new ground in its adherence to objectivity and a scientific precision that can be replicated and expanded, and it opens new horizons for investigation," he said.

Nevertheless, Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, which describes itself as "a non-profit organization that counters right-wing propaganda, exposes the 'ex-gay' myth and educates America about gay life," called the study a "deceptive sham with the goal of making it appear as if science backs fundamentalist beliefs on homosexuality."

"It comes as no shock that anti-gay 'researchers'" would produce a study claiming "you can pray away the gay," Besen said. "I suppose their next study will provide support for Pat Robertson's theory that homosexuality causes meteors and hurricanes."

Besen also criticized the size of the study sample as "unusually small" and asserted that people "should be extremely skeptical of such a mockery of the scientific method."

The 414-page book "Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation" is being published by InterVarsity Press and will be available to the public in October.

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THE PERFECT POPLAR

My son is going to college in downtown Los Angeles, so a few mornings a week I race up Baldwin Avenue to Foothill and on to the Sierra Villa light rail station. Although my bleary eyes dislike zipping along Foothill at 6:20 AM, I started to notice one certain tree in the median on the western edge of Arcadia, just before the Pasadena line. Many of you have no doubt seen the same tree. Although there are several poplars in that area, there’s one that seems to have been made by an artist. The trunk is perfectly smooth and the greenery is spread at a jaunty angle.

It is indeed “the perfect poplar.”

Why is it that I see that tree as so perfect? Why do I identify it as beautiful? Is it possible that I am hard-wired for beauty?

In his excellent book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Make Sense, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright speaks of what he calls “echoes of a voice.” Specifically, we hear the echoes of a voice for justice (right and wrong, fair and unfair), spirituality (“we were made for more than this”), relationships or love and the echoes of the voice of beauty.

Wright tells a parable: a musical manuscript is discovered that proves to be a genuine work of Mozart. However, the music is only that of the piano part of what appears a concerto. Long pauses are in the piece, but we have no clue what other instruments Mozart had in mind. We have evidence of a beautiful intelligent composition, but an incomplete view of that beauty.

So also when we look in the creation, we see beauty, but we cannot see or even perceive it all. It is “exquisite, yet leaving us unsatisfied.” It not as if we get to the point of ever saying, “Enough, I’ve seen all the beauty there is.”

Slowly it dawns on us that the reason that all the beauties of earth leave us unfilled is the realization that they are reflections, echoes of a greater beauty. “Heaven and earth are full of glory, a glory which stubbornly refuses to be reduced to terms of the senses of the humans who perceive it.”

There are the few who stubbornly refuse to see the glory behind the beauty. Our idea of beauty, they say, is an evolutionary adaptation. But the vast majority of the world’s peoples see the divine hidden behind the beauty. The beauty and glory of God is reflected and expressed in the beauty and the glory of His creation. Like the Mozart masterpiece, from where we stand we have only a portion of the manuscript.

Wright points out that the Biblical writers never try to gloss over the miseries and deficiencies of this world, and at the same time they stoutly maintained that the creation is good, and the good creation of an infinitely good God. They tell “the story of what…God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and put it to rights. And the story that they tell…indicates that the present world really is a signpost to a larger beauty, a deeper truth. It really is the authentic manuscript of one part of a masterpiece. The question is, What is the whole manuscript like, and how can we begin to hear the music the way it was intended?”

Beauty is a clue placed both in the creation and in the human heart by God himself as breadcrumb to follow to seek the road home. The perfect poplar, the Grand Canyon, a white sandy Hawaiian beach, a stunning desert vista, Victoria Falls—all clues placed here to remind us of the deeper beauty that can be seen if we look hard, and the echo that can be heard with cupped, expectant hands. Listen!—God is calling.

Half-Mile Tunnel Discovered Beneath Jerusalem

It seems remarkable that in a city like Jerusalem, which has been a central focus of archaeologists for a long time, major finds are still being made. The most recent: two weeks ago, Israeli archaeologists discovered a massive tunnel, believed to be around a half mile long and as much as ten feet high. The tunnel was built for drainage, but has been long sought in part because of its historical role as described by Josephus:

[W]hat makes the channel doubly significant is its role as an escape hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans, the dig's directors said.

As the [Second] [T]emple was being destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., numerous people took shelter in the drainage channel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem through its southern end, the historian Josephus Flavius wrote in "The War of the Jews."

Pottery shards, vessels and coins from the First Century have been found inside the tunnel. Here is the tunnel:

And some artifacts from the tunnel:

No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets

In 1904 William Borden graduated from a Chicago high school. As heir to the Borden Dairy estate, he was already a millionaire. For his high school graduation present, his parents gave 16-year-old Borden a trip around the world. As the young man traveled through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, he felt a growing burden for the world's hurting people. Finally, Bill Borden wrote home to say, "I'm going to give my life to prepare for the mission field."

One friend expressed surprise that he was "throwing himself away as a missionary."

In response, Bill wrote two words in the back of his Bible: "No reserves."

Even though young Borden was wealthy, he arrived on the campus of Yale University in 1905 trying to look like just one more freshman. Very quickly, however, Borden's classmates noticed something unusual about him and it wasn't his money. One of them wrote: "He came to college far ahead, spiritually, of any of us. He had already given his heart in full surrender to Christ and had really done it. We who were his classmates learned to lean on him and find in him a strength that was solid as a rock, just because of this settled purpose and consecration."

During his college years, Bill Borden made one entry in his personal journal that defined what his classmates were seeing in him. That entry said simply: "Say 'no' to self and 'yes' to Jesus every time."

During his first semester at Yale, Borden started something that would transform campus life. One of his friends described how it happened: "It was well on in the first term when Bill and I began to pray together in the morning before breakfast. I cannot say positively whose suggestion it was, but I feel sure it must have originated with Bill. We had been meeting only a short time when a third student joined us and soon after a fourth. The time was spent in prayer after a brief reading of Scripture. Bill's handling of Scripture was helpful. . . . He would read to us from the Bible, show us something that God had promised and then proceed to claim the promise with assurance."

Borden's small morning prayer group gave birth to a movement that spread across the campus. By the end of his first year, 150 freshmen were meeting for weekly Bible study and prayer. By the time Bill Borden was a senior, one thousand of Yale's 1,300 students were meeting in such groups.

Borden's outreach ministry was not confined to the Yale campus. He cared about widows and orphans and cripples. He rescued drunks from the streets of New Haven. To rehabilitate them, he founded the Yale Hope Mission.

Borden's missionary call narrowed to the Muslim Kansu people in China. Once that goal was in sight, Borden never wavered. He also inspired his classmates to consider missionary service.

Upon graduation from Yale, Borden turned down some high paying job offers. In his Bible, he wrote two more words: "No retreats."

William Borden went on to graduate work at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. When he finished his studies at Princeton, he sailed for China. Because he was hoping to work with Muslims, he stopped first in Egypt to study Arabic. While there, he contracted spinal meningitis. Within a month, 25-year-old William Borden was dead.

Was Borden's untimely death a waste? Not in God's plan. Prior to his death, Borden had written two more words in his Bible. Underneath the words "No reserves" and "No retreats," he had written: "No regrets."