A fellow-worker in an African country is successfully using text messaging (SMS) for ministry.  Here’s the key points of his work:

• He’s always had a big heart for cellphone and radio ministry.
• His deep study of the word of God gives him words to share via SMS.
• He has his own manual phone book which holds about 1000 contacts and a database for his SMS.
• He does his texting ministry every Sunday, spending about seven hours and $80 on the ministry each week.
• He’s funded by friends and by people who receive texts from him; the rest he covers out of his own funds.
• He sends different categories of SMS to different groups of people.
• One woman was saved from committing suicide; she was just about to kill herself when she received a godly, loving message that comforted her.
• He has seventy students working with him at the local university.
• He sends messages to about 1000 people and is seeing about 10,000 people being influenced because the text usually circulates from one friend to another.  Some people in his team forward his message to twenty or more people.
• He’s now planning to use the internet rather than manually sending SMS from his cellphone.

I’d like to thank my friend, Miheret Tilahun, for verifying this information about his colleague.

NOTE: I just started using Google Voice, which would enable a texting ministry to be for free over the internet, but Google Voice is only available in the U.S. at this time.  It was fantastically easy to text multiple people quickly from my computer.