NGJ Ministry Field Report

If you are a long-time subscriber you’ve probably read about our missionaries and our Light Bearer program. But some of you may not be aware that the NGJ magazine is just one small part of NGJ’s ministry. We hope you will be encouraged by this update on our iMissions program, which reaches tens of thousands of people all over the world every single day.

NGJ has only three full-time staff, plus a few part-time and seasonal laborers. How can just a few people publish a magazine going into tens of thousands of homes, process dozens of daily orders for books and CDs, run a prison ministry reaching 25,000+ inmates each year, print tens of thousands of books for missionaries all over the world, and still have time to reach a thousand people from every corner of the globe every hour, day and night, rain or shine, seven days a week?

It might sound impossible, but our iMissions program does exactly that.

Back in 2007 NGJ published the first edition of the Good and Evil book, a graphic novel that tells the stories of the Bible with an emphasis on the redemption plan. The vision was to create a book that would present the gospel in an engaging and easy-to-grasp format that would give people a deep understanding of their need for a savior. The book would become a little “missionary” that could reach people who might never pick up a Bible.

In just the first ten years, Good and Evil had been translated into dozens of languages, and a digital format for the book had been developed that would allow it to be read online, using any smartphone. NGJ started experimenting with using online advertising to distribute this book digitally in various countries and languages.

Today we have over 70 translations of Good and Evil and advertise it online in over 40 different languages. People all over the world click on ads inviting them to “read a free comic book,” “learn who Jesus is,” “find out why Jesus died,” or “know the living God.” They are taken to a website where they can read the entire book in their own language and download it to read again later. While you are reading this, dozens are reading about Jesus for the first time.

It only costs a few cents to reach someone in Afghanistan, India, Cuba, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Iran, Venezuela—anywhere in the world. Whether a country is “closed” or “open,” whether it is legal to evangelize or not, there are people online who are searching for truth.

Why is this ministry so important? I’ll let my sister Jenny, who has recently been helping us get more languages online, share about this:

As a kid I was fascinated with missionary stories, and I dreamed of getting the chance to take the gospel to a stone-age tribal people living in a jungle cut off from the world.

But as I got older I began believing that most tribes had been civilized and had some exposure to the gospel, so I left behind my fanciful childhood dreams. Although I still wanted to be a missionary, I realized it probably would not be in the jungle, nor to people who didn’t already have a way to hear the gospel.

Then I had the chance to work here at a NGJ for a few months. That short time only whet my appetite for being a part of outreach! I started taking a free introductory missions course from Global Frontier Missions and began learning about Unreached People Groups. What is an Unreached People Group (UPG)? Unreached peoples are not just people who are lost, but people who have no one who speaks their language and can tell them. Also, most of the nations in which UPGs live are dangerous and hostile to Christianity.

I was astonished to find that there actually are still people who have no one to tell them the gospel—over two billion people! And not only that, but only three out of every hundred missionaries go to the one-third of the world that needs them most!

That means that a third of the entire world’s population are born, live, and die without ever even having the chance to hear or accept the gospel.

My passion for reaching the lost was reignited with a new fervor! But how exactly could I reach someone who not only lives halfway around the world, but also has a different culture and speaks an entirely different language than me? Well, I started with the only thing I could do—pray. I asked God if he would use me somehow, in some way, someday, to reach even one small UPG.

In my mind I envisioned myself ten years older after years of preparation and many hours of language studies, hiking to a remote village in India and painstakingly building trust with the villagers to share the gospel, one conversation at a time.

But in the meantime, while working at NGJ, I got curious. Since part of my job was laying out new languages of the Good & Evil online version, I wondered: Who will be reading this? What people groups speak these languages? Are any of them unreached?

So I began researching each language, and I found out that most of the languages I was working with were spoken by people groups with less than 2% Christians! God is already answering my prayer, but much sooner and in an entirely different way than I expected!

For example, we just finished uploading the Assamese language of the Good and Evil book. There are 27 people groups that speak Assamese as their primary language, totaling 17,289,000 people. Less than 2% are Christians! Twenty of those people groups are “frontier” people groups, which means that not only do they have no churches or believers in their communities, but no one from outside is even trying to reach them.

iMissions can change that! It can reach places no missionary can safely travel. We are continuing to translate new languages and are currently working on formatting over a dozen completed translations so we can upload them and advertise them to people in unreached countries. Already, thousands of people who have no one else to tell them about Jesus are reading the gospel online every week!

Even though my part in preparing these translations is small, I feel so blessed and privileged to be a part of this ministry reaching the unreached with the good news of Jesus Christ! ~Jennilyn Grimes

When you donate to NGJ, you are also playing a vital part in helping us reach the unreached. When you designate your contribution to the “iMissions Fund” 100% of your donation is used to pay for online ads reaching the world with the gospel. Thank you!