Writer: Chris Ahrens | Photography: Talking Bibles collection
On July 2, 1948, Harvey and Lavina Hoekstra, along with their young family, sailed for remote regions of Africa, with the intent of spreading the Gospel. They arrived in Cairo just in time to experience the city being bombed by Israeli planes. That was the beginning of a lifetime of meaningful adventure that wound its way into the lands and the hearts of tribes who had never before heard the words that lead to eternal life.
    At one point the family walked ten days into the jungle in order to locate what would become their new home. Once at their destination, they lived in a tent for a year before building a house among the natives. For thirteen years they labored, converts coming slowly and surely as the Hoekstra family poured their lives into their work. Getting a Bible printed in a foreign tongue took years. Teaching people without a written language to read sometimes took even longer. Then a light. The Light? switched on.

Risen Magazine: Why is it so important for the Bible to go to all nations?
Paul Hoekstra: That’s a deep question. Mark and I grew up in Africa. Our parents went there in 1948 and we spent 30 years there. Our dad was a Bible translator—he took a steamboat with my mom and two older brothers down the Nile River to a village off the Nile, where they translated Anuak, an unwritten language. It took him thirteen years to translate the New Testament. They put it into the Romanized script and the Arabic script and taught the people how to read.
    In 1961 there was a civil war in Sudan, and we were given one week to leave the country. On the airplane that came to pick us up, the pilot had the first five printed copies of the New Testament. The American Bible Society printed, I think, 10,000 copies and eventually shipped them out to Africa. My father was able to give the people God’s word in their own language on the day we left.
    We left there and lived in Uganda, Kenya, and Egypt for a couple of years. Then we were invited to Ethiopia, where Haile Selassie was the emperor. There was a tribe of people called Majang, living in the southwest part of the country. They had no medical, no education, no schools. They were starving for the most part. They did some small farming, but mostly they gathered roots and honey from the jungle. We walked for ten days into the jungle. I was three years old at the time. We lived in a tent for a year, cut a clearing, and built a house. We lived near the chief, who was a witchdoctor. My dad got sick with hepatitis, so he wasn’t able to trek out into the villages and meet the people. This was around 1968, and he started recording tract-like messages, twelve minutes long, that were given to native believers. They would play the tape and stop the machine to give their own testimony as to what God had done for them. We saw a young woman who took a cassette player out to her mother’s village. When it was done playing the recording for the others, she said, “I haven’t been to school, I can’t speak like this machine, but this is real. Jesus lives in my heart. You know how I lived before, and now you see the change in me.” After that meeting thirteen women in that group wanted to become followers of Jesus as a result of the witness of this non-literate girl.
    We started seeing strings come in, which are used as their method of counting. If they went for a walk, there was a knot in the string for every day they were out. One day a big string with 110 knots came in. This fellow had a loincloth and a spear. Showing us the string, he said, These are all Mujang people on the left. There was a big knot in the center of the string and knots on the other side. He said, These are all Bola people… he had been cross-culturally witnessing to another tribal group. That’s a synopsis of what took place in the jungle.
    From there, we moved out to a frontier town where there were twelve language groups. We started using airplanes to build airstrips in the political centers and left cassettes for those leaders. In 1974 Haile Selassie was deposed through a revolution. We stayed three more years. Things deteriorated and we ended up back in the States, at Fuller Seminary. There was a professor there, Dr. McGovern, who was an expert on the Christian movement in India. He heard about the cassettes and said that India was a land that could use that type of ministry. So, my mom and dad went to India in 1979 and started a ministry in Bangalore. I went there in ’84 and recorded the first New Testament. They made so many copies of that first New Testament that the tape went clear. One thing led to another and I came back to the States and attended school at Pepperdine, where I graduated in broadcasting. I then went overseas to Singapore where I lived for twelve years and recorded the New Testament in various languages.
    The Bible’s been translated into 1,200-plus languages now. The problem is to teach literacy programs. In many areas of the world, they have oral-traditional societies. We started a program to reach 10,000 villages in India, using Bible listening kits, which were a player with a tape in it. We put them into Megapoli, about 100 kilometers from Bangalore. These were Lambadi tribal people. 1,200 of them got baptized. I think we’ve got scripture in over 20,000 villages now. My brother, Mark, was in the States and I would write home about the challenges of using cassette tapes. If you do a thousand villages, you’ve got 20,000 tapes to make and label and keep straight.
    Mark finally made a Talking Bible, which was a cassette player, actually. Our goal was 30 hours of sound, loud enough for 30 people to hear, for under 30 dollars. Now we have them at 100 hours, and you can get the entire Bible on it. We moved from a play-and-repeat model to one where you could navigate through the chapters. This did a number of things for us. To have the Talking Bible pa