Spreading the Gospel, bit by bit

Written by: Nathan Clark on March 25, 2010

Last weekend, you helped launch online church in three different major languages; Russian, Ukrainian and Afrikaans.

We recently sent two different teams bearing technology: one to New Life in Kiev, Ukraine; and another to Vredelust in Capetown, South Africa. Each team delivered hardware that Northland uses for online worship to our church partners, so that they could begin offering their services online to seekers and worshipers around the world. Both churches proceeded to launch online worship services last weekend.

The results?

Vredelust offered their service online in Afrikaans, a common language in South Africa spoken by 16 million people worldwide. Pastor Joel was in the country for the first service, and actually preached the message on Sunday morning (with a translator, of course). About 100 people joined in from all around the world to worship with our Capetown partner on their website.

New Life started their online services last weekend, as well. Located in Kiev, Ukraine, New Life offers services in both Ukrainian and Russian. Ukrainian is spoken by 47 million people worldwide and was an “underground” language for much of the time that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Many Ukrainians also speak Russian, so the church has offered services in both languages for some time. New Life is also holding their Russian service online, which is exciting because there are 160 million people in the world who speak Russian. 

Vredelust and New Life join Kasr El Dobara, our partner in Cairo, Egypt, in offering live worship online. Kasr El Dobara started offering online worship at the end of 2009 to 530 million people in the Arabic-speaking world.

As best as we can tell, all three churches are the first to offer online church in their respective languages, meaning that 868 million people can now worship online from anywhere in the world, in their heart language.

Our thanks and congratulations go out to Vredelust, New Life and Kasr El Dobara for reaching this significant milestone and caring for their communities in this profound way.

Thanks to everyone in the Northland congregation, too, because your passion for God expressed in partnership and technology continues to bring hope and change all over the world.

There are 915 million people who speak English in the world. With these new worship environments the numbers of people who could be affected by Northland for the Gospel has almost doubled to 1.7 trillion people, through the great work of our partners.