HCJB World Radio encourages people to ‘Turn the Radios On’.

Africa (MNN)–There’s a new networking effort between American Christian radio stations, and their counterparts overseas.

It’s a kind of mentoring venture, with an eye cast toward the future church. HCJB World Radio’s Heide Jones says they have a project called ‘Turn the Radios On’, involving fix-tuned radios. “Stations are having their listeners purchase a radio, or a portion of their sharathon is going towards purchasing these radios. We’re sending them to many of our radio plants and this in enabling the stations to go out into their communities pass out these radios to homeless people.”

Most of the radios are targeted for the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. These include Tanzania, South Africa, Swaziland, Burundi, Lesotho, Madagascar and Malawi.

Once the radios are ‘sponsored’, it takes between three to four months to get them to their destination. The sets are ordered when donations received total the minimum order for 500 radios.

The next step: once manufactured, the radios will be shipped to that country’s local Christian radio station and distributed by the station’s staff to the people in their listening area.

Sometimes, Jones says, the sponsoring radio station sends a team for the distribution. That was the case on a recent trip to Lesotho.

She says the team saw firsthand how the Gospel touches people through Christian radio. As they passed through an poor area, team members handed out the radios to a group of prostitues.

Their response was astounding. “These women were just floored that these people would even give them anything, to begin with. And, as they were listening, there were four of them, that they know of, that came to Christ by listening to this radio plant.”

$30 helps the ‘Turn the Radios On’ outreach deliver a sturdy, fix-tuned radio and the message of Christ to a family that might not hear it any other way. So far, since 1999, the project has seen more than 28-thousand radios placed.