"The illiteracy rates continue to be high in a lot of countries where people would’ve thought they would have learned to read by now," says Tom Dudenhoffer, president of ASM. "I’m most familiar with the details in Kenya for instance. Schooling is not free and parents have to come up with the money to pay for their children to go to school. Poverty is so persistent in the economy, that many parents simply can’t afford to send their children to school. Even though the work of missionaries and the translation of God’s Word has been available, in some cases almost up to a hundred years, these people are still not learning to read and will not learn to read because the economy does not allow them to learn to read. The illiteracy rates in the rural areas can be as high as ninety five percent."

Audio Scripture Ministries was formed in 1967 to meet that challenge, just as small, inexpensive cassette tape players were first being introduced. ASM helped a sister ministry develop a special windup tape player that could be used in remote settings.

Dudenhoffer says of the devise, "It provided a real powerful tool to take God’s Word into areas where, because of the isolation or because of the poverty or for whatever reason, people were not able to read and did not have access to the kind of, either electrical or technological equipment that we consider to be just standard today. Over the years little improvements have been made on it. We’ve added jacks for an external solar panel to run the tape player. We can also use rechargeable batteries so that it can be used that way and the solar panels can also charge the batteries."

Just last year ASM made some of these windup cassette players and tapes available to Christians in Kenya working with Masai tribesmen. Dudenhoffer remembers, "They came back and told us that the people were so excited to hear God’s Word in their own language, even though this is something that’s been available for probably up to – almost twenty years. And then the thing that tickled us the most was the enthusiasm that the people spoke about when they saw the tape players and called it new technology. They thought this was just an amazing tool to see a tape player that didn’t require batteries or anything like that."

Over the yeas, Audio Scripture Ministries have been involved in recording God’s Word in about two hundred languages, including some Native American dialects. They’re working right now with a ministry to the Lakota Sioux, duplicating copies of the Christmas and Easter stories in the tribal tongue.

ASM has a small staff and studios in Holland, Michigan and a satellite office in Africa. But most new scripture recording projects, like the Lakota work, are taken on in cooperation with other ministries.

"We try to provide a level of support that’s needed to make the scripture recording, the duplication and the distribution possible in the various locations. We can do this in any number of ways. We can supply the equipment so that an initial recording can be made. We might provide equipment so that duplicated copies of the pre-recorded scriptures can be made, " Dudenhoffer says.

Looking to the future, Audio Scripture Ministries are developing recordings for use with the new generation of digital devices.

"We can put the New Testament on a memory chip now, the kind that are used for digital cameras and other kinds of digital equipment," Duddenhoffer explains. "The cost is still a little to high for us to distribute these around the world, but the advantage that we see to this when the cost comes down is that the scriptures can be indexed. That is, you can actually look up a particular chapter and a particular verse."

Public readings from the Bible aren’t as common as they once were here in the States. Tom Duddenhoffer says many American Christians have forgotten just how powerful the spoken Word can be.

"You think back for instance at the renewal and revival that Nehemiah led as he rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem," Duddenhoffer says, citing an example from the Old Testament portion of the scriptures. "As he concluded that project, the scriptures, the Law as they had available to them in that day, was broken out and the people stood on this large platform and they read it out loud to the people who stood for the reading. And at the conclusion of hearing the Word of God they were convicted and had a tremendous renewal and revival among the people at that time."

If you would like to learn more about ASM, visit their website at www.asmtoday.org. Tom Dudenhoffer and the ministry team at Audio Scripture Ministries, helping spiritual seekers worldwide hear God’s Word in their native tongue…lives well lived.