In the April edition of Listening World magazine we told our supporters about a programme called Power in Persecution. This radio programme is produced through the extensive contacts of TWR in collaboration with national partners ERF Medien of Germany and TWR Czech.
One of the other organisations involved with the project is SGA (The Slavic Gospel Association). We spoke with SGA’s Regional Representative for Northern England and North Wales, Andrew Coleclough to find out more about the project.
We began by asking Andrew about the situation in Central Asia, and he outlined for us the persecution faced particularly by the evangelical Christian minority, including routine surveillance, interrogation and even a recent show trial where two Christians were fined 100 times their monthly salary for spreading the Gospel.
Into that context comes Power in Persecution, a year’s worth of weekly 15 minute programmes, produced and aired in Central Asia featuring testimonies from people who have faced persecution and Bible teaching on the theme of persecution. The aim of the programme, Andrew told us, is threefold:
- First of all to encourage those Christians who are going through persecution;
- To raise awareness among other believers who are not;
- And to promote prayer for the Christians who are suffering in those countries.
Central Asia is a very ethnically diverse area, with a large number of local languages. However, since the Soviet era Russian has been something of a common language, so the programme has initially been made in Russian and Karakalpak (a local language).
We asked Andrew about the future plans for the project.
“The plan is to translate the programme into the Uzbek language. The Uzbek people group is by far the largest people group in Central Asia, so that’s the plan for the future. We are hoping that will be the start of translation into several languages: the Kazakh language becoming more and more used in Kazakhstan: there are more than 10 million people who speak the Kazakh language, so that is a long-term plan for this project.”
We hope that you will join us in praying for this project which brings hope in the darkest of places. Here are some pointers to guide your prayer:
- For Power in Persecution to be a great blessing and encouragement to the believers who are facing persecution in those lands.
- For the addition of new languages.
- For those who are involved in the production of these programmes, that they will be kept safe and that the studios would be kept operational.
