A Bible School for Rural Liberia using DigiResources

Liberia is a very poor country and since their civil war in 2003 when most infrastructure was destroyed there is no electricity in the entire country except from small portable generators. The church leaders there are zealous to know the Bible better so that they can teach the people Christ’s ways but have had very limited training opportunities. Buchannan the countries second largest city is 80 miles and 6 hours by a poor road from the capital. In the past the only locally available training for church leaders and pastors has been short conferences when teachers come for a week every year or two from western countries.

In March 2007 MAF’s Digital Resources manager, Mike Holman went with two pastors from Dallas area churches to teach and setup a learning center in a rural area of Liberia near Buchannan. While there Mike taught Simply the Story from The God’s Story Project as a model for reaching oral literates with messages from the Bible. For him the he rest of the trip was focused on the startup of a new Bible School and training its leaders in the use of Digital Resources and the equipment to facilitate it.

MAFLT brought a notebook computer, an LCD projector and our 500 Gigabyte digital library which has 45,000 books, 7000 hours of audio training and 1000 hours of video training. They will use the LCD projector we took to teach a wide range of classes from this digital library. MAFLT and other partners also supplied solar battery chargers and MP3 audio players so local church leaders can listen to audio training resources at their homes and while traveling. These materials plus some traditional classes taught by local seminary graduates are the foundation of a new International Gospel Outreach Bible College that was dedicated during the trip.