Unlocking the Bible

John, AM-CCSM's literature coordinator. Posted on 9 October 2009.

In 2004, AM-CCSM's international director Ross Paterson was approached by a very popular English Bible teacher, David Pawson, who asked Ross to help make his ‘Unlocking the Bible' series available to the Chinese Church.

David has been one of the most prolific teachers of the Bible for the last four decades and has produced a large volume of teaching materials. Probably the most significant of these has been his work entitled ‘Unlocking the Bible'.

‘Unlocking the Bible' is a series of talks delivered by David over a number of years. It covers every book of the Bible and opens up the Word of God in a fresh and powerful way. Avoiding the small detail of verse by verse studies, the series sets out the epic story of God and His people. The historical background, culture and people are introduced and the teaching applied to the modern world, thus giving the listener the ‘big picture' of what the Bible is all about.

When Ross brought this project to the literature team of AM-CCSM, we were very excited as we knew the power of David's teaching firsthand, having heard him on numerous occasions.

The material was originally produced in English on 43 DVDs and we understood immediately that this was going to be a very large project. The biggest hurdle to get over was finding the right voice to overdub David's English with Mandarin Chinese. We put out many feelers to discover the right person, but after two years of searching, trying this person and then another, we were still unsuccessful. We then went to GoodTV, a television station in Taiwan for whom Ross had been delivering talks in Chinese for broadcasting in Taiwan and China (via satellite) and they agreed to translate, overdub and produce broadcast quality DVDs for us. They were able to find the right person to do the voice overdubbing and so, in the summer of 2006, the work began to bring the teaching of David Pawson to the Chinese house churches.

You can imagine that this project seemed like a mountain we had to climb in terms of the amount of work to do and it also needed a large amount of money to get it off the ground. Then one of the literature team shared the concept of this project with a businessman he met in Hong Kong, who also got excited about it and ended up donating the whole amount required to translate and master these talks.

Next we were introduced to a brother inside China who was working on Christian videos for the church and he offered to take the DVD masters, compress the video of each talk and produce new masters that contained eight talks each. Slowly over the next three years we were able to put together a full set of the teaching on 12 DVDs, thus reducing the cost of production of the whole set for use inside China. The brother who produced the final masters also uploaded the videos onto Chinese video web sites. In just one month the first of these had been downloaded and viewed more than 40,000 times!

When the first set of discs - the New Testament - was completed, we were able to copy and distribute thousands of them to the Church in China. We got some very encouraging feedback.

One of our in-China co-workers sent this to us soon after we had started to distribute some of the New Testament talks:

"For a long time I have been receiving a lot of requests for David Pawson's DVDs. Almost everyone who receives part of the DVD series asks for more. They want the whole set! ‘M' has been asking for it time and again over the last six months. People have also made copies for their friends and they keep asking me for the rest of the series. I told them to wait a while. There are many people waiting for these DVDs to come."

She also wrote: "I got an email from Mr. S. He told us about a group that watches the DVDs, one talk per week, and afterwards they discuss them. Here are two responses:

One man said he had felt bored reading the Bible in the past, because he couldn't understand it. So every time he had to force himself to read it. But after he watched the DVDs and got some basic background information and understood the key points, he found he became more interested in reading it. He felt he could learn new things whenever he read it.

Another woman said she had read the Bible three times since she became a Christian. She had to force herself to read it the first time. The second time, she felt she understood a little more and learned a little bit. Now she's reading it for the third time and this time she watches the DVD first, then reads the relevant book, and then may go back to watch the DVD again if she has questions. This way she feels she can learn a lot and she often feels very emotional and has tears in her eyes.

Mr. S said that, from his personal experience of leading groups over the past year, he feels that there is much wrong understanding of the Bible, most of which is caused by wrong explaining of the Bible, which is very common in China. Because there are only a few people who have complete and correct Bible teaching materials."

There are many more exciting testimonies that we could share with you but there is not room here to do so.

We praise God that in September 2009, production and distribution began of the whole set of 12 ‘Unlocking the Bible' DVDs (covering both the Old and New Testaments). We are currently producing and distributing 1,000 sets (12,000 DVDs) every month.