To France, Russia, Australia, and Beyond
By Paul Shingledecker, Retiree, HaitiJuly-September 2014
If you had asked me 15 years ago what audience Radio Lumière was trying to reach, I would have told you, “The Radio Lumière Network covers 90 percent of the island of Haiti with Christian broadcasting.”
That was before we got on the Internet. For years it was just a dream to “stream” our network signal so Haitians in the U.S. could hear it too. It was a dream because we didn’t have either the equipment or an adequate Internet connection to make it happen. Still the dream was there—a creative dream to reach more people for Christ.
One day the chief engineer, a Haitian, decided it was time to try it with what we had. Sure enough, it didn’t sound too bad. We had lots of drop outs and buffering, but we put it on our website and people started listening. From those humble beginnings, we now have a much more robust signal and listeners all over the world. At any moment, 500 to 2,000 people are listening 24/7. We’ve logged listeners from as far away as Australia, Africa, and even Russia. Here’s a note from director Varnel Jeune’s recent newsletter:
“I received an email this week from a small group of brothers and sisters, Haitians, living in Moscow, Russia. They spoke of the fact that religious liberty is very limited there. They say they meet every Sunday semi-secretly in a basement. There they listen by way of the Internet to the worship services broadcast by Radio Lumière and this becomes their church!
“One day the staff came to me and said they wanted to stream our signal over the telephone. I thought, ‘Who would want to listen to radio on the telephone, what with the poor audio quality and all?’ But a little company, Audio Now, in Washington, D.C., streams stations like ours to anyone who wants to call in. To my surprise, it caught on. Recent statistics show 1,541 calls in the U.S., 71 in France, and two in the Dominican Republic! The average listening time is over 30 minutes per call. Another 1,600 people around the world heard the gospel in Haitian Creole!”
ACT: Go to www.radiolumiere.org and click on Listen or call 712.432.6363.
MORE: Radio Lumière has an Android app. Look for it in Play Store under Radio Lumière.
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