Lifeword Community Radio: Creating a Culturally-Relevant Swahili Broadcast

(If you’ve ever been curious about Lifeword’s broadcasts and what they sound like, the following article by Rick Russell will explain how different formats are used for different cultures. Continue to pray for the already-recorded Swahili broadcast, which should go live in April or May, making Swahili the 37^th Lifeword language.)

“Bro. Rick, there has never been a Swahili radio program like this. I believe the people will like it a lot!” Those were the words of one of our Swahili broadcasters at the end of our first day of training in December 2015.

The idea for this format came from our Garifuna brethren in Central America. At their first opportunity to create a broadcast format all of their own in 2009, they did something that no American broadcaster would ever do, which may be exactly why it works so well in their culture. The Garifuna program has eight pastors sitting around a table, all talking at once! When Lifeword Program Director Luis Ortega questioned the advisability of so many voices talking at once, it was explained, “This is how the Garifuna always do!”

Since the Garifuna people group has its origins in Africa, Luis and I suspected that a similar format might work well in the Swahili culture. Sure enough, in our planning conversations last year with Renatus Kanunu, we discovered that there is a well-known Swahili custom for making village decisions. The chief calls together the heads of the various families and presents the issue. One by one, they offer possible solutions. If the group cannot come to a consensus, it falls to the chief, as the village’s ultimate authority, to render a decision.

In Lifeword’s new Swahili program NenoUzima (WordLife), the Bible is personified as the words of our “chief”. It is his directives and principles which we look to in order to make the proper decisions in all aspects of our lives.

The first thing we do on each week’s program is to have the discussion leader (personifying the chief) explain the issue or question under discussion. The pastors then take a couple of minutes to put forward “man’s answers”, prefacing each statement with things like, “My father used to say…”, or “It’s always been the Swahili custom to…”, or “Some religions say….” Then relevant Bible passages are introduced. In the last five minutes of the program, the “chief” correlates the instruction of those verses, allowing the Bible to interpret the Bible and bringing the group to agreement regarding the Bible’s instruction on that particular question. The program then culminates in a prayer thanking God for providing his Word as the trustworthy guide for our lives.

After BMA Productions puts the finishing touches on the broadcast, TWR will broadcast NenoUzima by shortwave and satellite and we will find local FM affiliates in as many cities as possible where the churches of the Taborah Baptist Association are located (widely dispersed across western Tanzania and into Burundi and Rhwanda).

Pray that NenoUzima will be used by God in a powerful way to touch the lives of Swahili believers and non-believers to bring his light to this still-unreached people group.