85+ Years of telling the story of Jesus in Every Language
Joy Ridderhof had the first Gospel record in Spanish pressed on the last day of 1938, after realizing the effectiveness of the repetition of a spoken message. The records soon attracted attention, producing requests for more messages from Honduras, then other Spanish-speaking countries in Central and South America. Then missionaries to the Navajo tribe said, “Our people need records in their language, too!” This turned “Spanish Gospel Recordings” into “Gospel Recordings.”
The novel concept of making the Gospel available on records spread; recordings were requested for Mexico, Alaska, and the Philippines. The recording was done in makeshift studios in church buildings, classrooms, or just out under a tree. The recorded material then had to be edited and sometimes have music or songs added to make it ready for distribution. In 1953, the first GR branch in Australia came into being. Engineers in Los Angeles and Sydney worked on ever-better recording equipment and also players for sharing what was produced.
GR engineers invented the first hand wound tape recorders: Mini Dyke and Readycorder. Eventually the recording program settled on the battery-operated Nagra III (1957) which was dependent on cut and splice editing but produced professional-grade results. GRN initially produced all the phonograph records in their Los Angeles factory.
Distribution was done through missions or churches that had been established in the particular language area, or by teams of people moving from village to village. Recordings were also played or made available in clinics, schools and in market places. Villagers heard (in many cases for the first time), the Word of Life - and in a language that they fully understood. GR produced thousands of simple cardboard record players that accompanied the records worldwide. In 1972, the audio cassette was introduced and GR eventually switched all of the material on records to the cassettes.
As language mapping and movements such as “Unreached Peoples” came into being, goals such as “Every Tongue By ‘81” were focused on. Such dates passed, but the work kept on, little by little, language by language, all over the world. Teams of recordists made a difference in the Amazon, in the Himalayas, in island nations straddling the Equator. Home-based staff and a growing number of supporters kept the work going with interest, with gifts, with prayer. God blessed the sacrificial living and giving of so many.
New bases sprung up, new workers were trained and sent out, new waves of churches supported the work around the world. Richer countries subsidized newer offices in less endowed areas of the world. In 1993, Global Recordings Network International was born, a network of historically Gospel Recordings offices around the world.
In 2001, Gospel Recordings USA moved from Los Angeles to Temecula, California. Through the years, GRN had developed and supplied specialized players for use in underdeveloped areas: cardboard record players, hand-wound portable record players, cassette players, and mp3 players. Some now are solar-powered. Offices continued to be added, and national recordists trained on several continents.
All recording is now performed digitally with a Mix-Pre laptop, and all editing likewise done digitally on computers. The quadrennial International Council with representation from every center and base keeps us on course. An International Leadership Team, with members from representative centers, meets together several times a year.
In 2020, the USA office moved to Catalina, Arizona. Today digital and internet technology enables us to take the Gospel to people all over the world. Both end users and those ministering to them can download messages from our international website, the 5fish app, or the GRN MapApp.
GRN constantly seeks to update equipment and methods so that the unreached might be more effectively reached. There are thousands more new recordings to be made and older ones to be updated, new recordists to be trained, and new distribution methods such as mobile technologies to be developed.
Our goal is to have hundreds of staff, volunteers, and recording teams Millions of messages downloaded from 5fish and our international website. Whatever technologies or techniques are used, the heart of Global Recordings Network remains: telling the story of Jesus in every language. What part will you have in helping us in making the Gospel message available to all of the heart-language groups in the world?
Please support the work of GRN by praying for the members serving around the world, and for the projects in which they are involved. Pray also for a constant flow of new workers to carry on the task. There is so much yet to be done to bring the Gospel to every tribe and tongue and it can only be done with the prayer support of God's faithful people.
Pray for open hearts, new recordings, and workers who carry the Gospel to every tribe and tongue.
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