One of Viña Association’s most important partners is Hosanna and the Faith Comes By Hearing program. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Hosanna contracts with Viña to record Scripture translations in indigenous Mayan languages.

Albuquerque, N.M. - Hosanna’s founders could have been shouting, “Hallelujah!”

     Starting with a heavenly idea to bring audio Scriptures to the people. By the mid-1980s, Hosanna* had grown to employ 250 people, distributing 20 million Scripture cassettes a year. Surely, this was the hand of God blessing their ministry.

     But something troubled them.

     Reports suggested they were reaching more than a half million families a year, but Hosanna received only 10 to 15 stories a year of how God was using the recordings to change lives.“That tells you something’s wrong,” said Morgan Jackson, Faith Comes By Hearing’s international director.

     A study revealed that pastors, elders and Sunday school teachers were the most frequent customers. These people already were committed believers, reading their own Bibles with lives changed for God’s glory.

     Hosanna’s directors decided not to hire any more workers until they found a more effective means of reaching their target audience: people (including regular church attendees) who were not regularly feeding on the Word of God.

     Hosanna conducted a series of tests and trials to improve its method, failing time after time to succeed. Finally, at the end of four years, they discovered five steps to getting people to hearing the Word of God.

     First, the work has to be done through local churches. Second, the pastor must challenge the church family to join him in listening through the New Testament. Third, the pastor must preach two consecutive Sundays, issuing a challenge to the church. Fourth, he must instruct the people on where and when to listen, setting aside regular listening times. Fifth, the pastor must sign a commitment to listen to the tapes.

     The principles are mirrored in the Scriptures in Nehemiah 8 and II Kings 22 & 23. In these cases, the children of Israel came together to hear scribes read the Word of God to them. In both cases, hearing the Scriptures touched the hearts of the people. They confessed their sins, repented and committed themselves to obey God.

     Hosanna altered its own approach and followed this model and the five principles it created.

     “When we did that, we found 70 to 100 percent of the people would do it,” Jackson said. “But it really slowed us down.”

     Since beginning this more involved and committed program, some 47,000 U.S. churches had completed the Scripture listening program by mid 2003. As a nondenominational ministry, Hosanna will work with any church group interested in hearing its Scripture recordings.

     Soon, however, Hosanna began getting inquiries from followers of Jesus Christ who lived outside the United States.

     “What about Haiti? What about Spanish? Don’t you realize 80 percent of our people are illiterate?” These were some of the questions Jackson began to hear.

     Then he began to hear stories that shocked him. One follower in Jamaica told him how she had been invited to attend a ceremony dedicating a new church construction project to God. As workers began to pour the foundation, the pastor proudly threw hundreds of Bibles into the cement. “He wanted her to see that they were building their church on the foundation of the Word of God,” Jackson said. He heard of similar stories in Nigeria.

     In Haiti, some devout women would tear a page out of the Scriptures every day and put it in their family’s soup. “They’d heard that man does not live by bread alone but by the Word of God,” Jackson said. “We had no idea they were eating them, burying them, offering chickens to them. We realized 60 percent of the world is oral and functionally illiterate.”

     Convinced of the need, Hosanna struck out overseas, arriving in Guatemala in 1993 where it joined forces with Viña Association. About the same time, Hosanna began work in Congo, Ghana, Kenya and the Ukraine. Hosanna trained workers and technicians at its centers to record the Scriptures that will subsequently be duplicated en masse at its New Mexico headquarters.

     Hosanna paid for the recording equipment, upgrading technologies four times over a decade. Viña originally used reel-to-reel tape recorders. Now, its technicians travel lightly, using laptop computers and compact microphones to record.

     Hosanna’s approach was always the same: Emphasize hearing the Word of God. Even the first books of the Bible, the Torah, emphasize hearing: “Hear Oh Israel,” “talk” to your children to teach them, Deut. 6:4-7. In the New Testament, it’s the same. Jesus didn’t write anything down: He spoke to the people. His disciples taught boldly, but they were “uneducated and untrained men,” Acts 4:13.

     According to the biblical pattern, Hosanna’s dramatized recordings are designed to be played to groups. Many listeners enjoy hearing it again, rewinding the tape to discuss it, argue and debate.

     As of 2008 Hosanna’s Faith Comes By Hearing program had reached 98 countries, working in 330 languages. Of these, Viña had recorded 34 languages.

     * Hosanna should not be confused with the music-recording ministry with the same name.