How we see the world

When we look at the world, we see a need that demands a response and an incredible opportunity.

A Need

In people groups all over the world, new believers want to learn to be disciples of Christ, but they do not have the opportunity to do so. They need access to discipleship materials and resources in their own language that enable them to grow in spiritual maturity. Though thousands of discipleship resources exist in some common languages, many are under copyright and so cannot be legally translated, adapted and freely redistributed without restriction.

The global church needs to be equipped with open discipleship tools.

Our Response

We are creating legally unrestricted discipleship resources that equip believers everywhere in the world, in any language, to grow as disciples of Christ. We are making the resources available on the Internet, on mobile devices and in print as well as multimedia formats.

• Free & Open – Distant Shores Media started the Door43 project (http://door43.org) as an open-membership platform for creating open discipleship resources. All the resources are released under a Creative Commons license and so can be legally translated, adapted, distributed and used for any ministry purpose, for free. This makes it so believers anywhere in the world do not need to start from scratch to create discipleship resources in their language – a solid core of Biblical content is available at no charge and they are free to translate and adapt the resources for effective use in their own language and culture.
• Multimedia & Orality – In addition to creating text-based materials, we are also creating audio and video resources that make discipleship tools available to people who don't (or are not able to) read to learn.
• Technology & New Media – By using cutting-edge technology and networking with believers around the world, we are facilitating the creation of unrestricted discipleship resources of the highest quality. We are also developing content distribution systems that make it possible to push these resources in multimedia and text-based formats to mobile phones and web browsers in any language, anywhere in the world, instantaneously.

Your Opportunity

We need your help! From creating new resources to reviewing and editing existing materials to translating content into every language of the world – you can be a part of equipping the global church with discipleship tools. Never before in history has it been possible to do so much in the advance of God's Kingdom, starting right from your own living room on your own computer.

To find out how you can get involved, click here.

The context that frames it all

The key factors that form the foundation for our vision are listed here and described in further detail below:

• The world is becoming more connected
• The world consumes media
• The world is oral
• The world is multilingual
• The global church is on the rise
• The future of ministry is Open

The world is becoming more connected

Recent studies show that over 70% of the world's population owns a mobile phone and that even in some of the least-connected parts of the world, mobile phones are becoming a key tool for small businesses and social connectedness. The Internet also continues to extend its reach to the farthest corners of the globe as Internet coffee shops are opened in some of the most remote locations on the planet and mobile phone networks extend access far beyond the reaches of phone lines and roads. In the next 4-5 years, the number of mobile phones accessing the Internet is expected to equal and then surpass the number of PCs accessing the Internet (Source: Cellular News).

At the same time as the world is becoming more connected, technology is continuing to shrink in size and increase in capability. What used to require a PC at home, laptop for the road, cell phone, pager, PDA, CD player and GPS receiver can now be accomplished by a mobile phone at a fraction of the expense. People in developing countries are skipping directly to this “mobile phone as computer” phase without ever owning a PC and often long before the electric grid makes it to their village. These changes are bringing unprecedented opportunities for everything from global commerce to discipleship initiatives.

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The world consumes media

The rise of the MTV/Internet generations and their portable media players along with the decline of reading in literate countries (see below) is resulting in more media being consumed by more people than ever before. This includes music downloads, podcasts & videocasts, streaming audio/video (e.g. Internet radio stations, YouTube), etc.

The combination of growing global connectedness and the increase in consumption and worldwide distribution of media is resulting in the generations growing up with this as the norm having far more in common with each other (crossing cultural, linguistic and geographic boundaries) than any other generations before. While there are still significant differences, the younger generations from the vast majority of cultures around the world are growing more similar to each other, often at the expense of a widening gap between their generation and the generations before them. Just about everything that defines them – including the music they listen to, the movies they watch, the websites they visit, the dance moves they make, the mobile devices they own, and their postmodern/materialistic values and beliefs – is increasingly converging closer together. Whether this is an opportunity for the advance of the Good News or a hindrance to it is arguable, but the point is that it is happening at an increasing pace and is changing the rules of how ministry is done.

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The world is oral

The vast majority of the world's population is primarily oral in their preferred means of communicating and learning new information. Estimates suggest that over 85% of people worldwide (and some estimates are much higher) prefer to learn new information through non-print means (e.g. talking, listening to someone speak, watching the news, listening to the radio, etc.). This holds true for pre-literate societies (where people are 100% oral learners) as well as highly literate societies. Publishing companies in the Middle East, with all it's millions of people, say that if a book sells only 5,000 copies it is a best-seller. Most of the societies in that part of the world are literate but the people do not usually read to learn new information, they learn through oral means and memorize the material.

In addition to the “preferred orality” of some cultures, there is what some refer to as “secondary orality” where societies that are literate become more oral in their communication and learning preference. Western societies tend to be moving in this direction as media consumption increases (television, radio, audio books, etc.), reading becomes more limited to text messages, Facebook updates, web pages and e-mails and fewer people read for pleasure or learning.

Regardless of how societies have come to where they are now, the fact that oral learning is the norm and not the exception all over the world is a critical understanding for any ministry that wants to have a lasting impact for the Kingdom.

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The world is multilingual

There are ~7,000 living languages in the world today. Every one of these languages will someday have believers in it that will understand the Truth better and learn to obey everything that Jesus has commanded more readily if they can hear it and learn in their own language. Ministry organizations all over the world continue to find that effective discipleship efforts use the “heart” language of the person being discipled to communicate at the heart level. A person may understand other languages and those languages can be used with some good results, but penetrating to the point of changing the deepest beliefs of a person's worldview requires communicating the Truth of the Word in the language that speaks to the deepest part of who they are.

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The global church is on the rise

God is at work all over the world to raise up for Himself people from the least-reached and least-privileged cultures and language groups. People in Papua New Guinea are literally walking out of the jungle with a call from God to translate the Bible into their own language. Brazilian Indian believers are rising up with the call of God in their hearts to take the Good News to their fellow Indians who have not yet heard. Churches in Thailand are stepping out in cross-cultural ministry to the desperately needy and lost people in neighboring countries. These examples, and countless others like them all over the world, illustrate the wide-open door for ministry organizations to come alongside these local believers and churches in a supportive role. By providing assistance and tools to the global church according to its need, the church everywhere is equipped to accomplish the specific call of God in their lives with increased efficiency and effectiveness.

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The future of the global church is Open

The concept of unrestricted discipleship material is not new. Some of the most common and well-known resources in the public domain include:

• The King James Version of the Bible
• Matthew Henry's commentaries
• Jamieson, Fausset & Brown Commentary

The public domain is at the other end of the spectrum from copyright in that no one owns or controls the rights to a work in the public domain. Not surprisingly, works in the public domain tend to be used in more places, for more reasons, by more people precisely because they are freely available and legally redistributable.

As the global church continues to rise to the challenge of making disciples of all nations, there is an urgent need for discipleship materials that encourage free and legal access, modification, use and distribution. There are many good resources that could be useful to the global church, but almost all of them are significantly limited in their use by the copyrights which control their use.

The solution is not simply to sell the resources at discounted prices or give them away free (gratis) but to give people the freedom (libre) to take the materials and resources and make them their own. By partnering together to design resources that are intended to be both free and open from the outset, we bypass the sticky issues of intellectual property rights, copyright infringement, royalties and licenses and enable the unhindered advance of the global church.