Stories from the Field

April 2004

Bookmarking the gospel in the Middle East

A team of American high school students traveled around a major Middle Eastern city in order to map out the location of every Internet cafe in the city. Most Middle Easterners don’t have their own computer and Internet connections. Instead, they welcome the relatively inexpensive and anonymous ability to log-on to the cyber world through public Internet cafes. Their research would help Christian personnel to know how to better reach the city for Christ.

The students spent the next few days visiting dozens of these cafes, logging onto the computers and resetting all of the Internet bookmarks and favorite settings from the usual pornography, news and commerce to sites where the gospel, testimonies and even streaming video of the JESUS film could be found in the Arabic language.

Later, they visited the city’s many video rental kiosks. These are typically one-man video rental stands. They show the owner their JESUS film video and tell him that they are leaving the city at the end of the week and would rather not take the video with them. If he would like to have it and rent it out, they will be happy to give it to him. Very few video renters are unwilling to receive and distribute a video about the life of the Prophet Jesus. And the gospel goes forth.