JAARS Volunteers Speak

College graduation is usually a time when family come to see the graduate receive a diploma. For David Sampson it was different. David graduated with a major in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Computer Science, then returned home.

“My parents are Wycliffe translators. I went to Africa to help them and other missionaries in the area in technical areas for a year and then came to the JAARS Center. I’m here helping while seeking God’s mind on what He wants me to do long term,” David says.

What was the need?

Vic Dickey, working at JAARS Vernacular Media Services, praises God for David’s coming. “We didn’t go out and get him. God sent him!”

Vic, in his second Wycliffe career, loves what he’s doing now as much as he loved flying translators over the mountains and rivers of Papua New Guinea.

Over the past four years, he has been collecting and categorizing s tories. Each story illustrates how God’s Word can be presented using a specific media tactic—“a tactic that first considers the traditional or preferred media a people group use to take in new information,” Vic explains. “The focus is on the audience and the intended application, rather than the media used.”

Technically this story-collecting is “a media delivery system called Scripture Promotion and Resource Knowledgebase (SPARK),” Vic says. As Vic has worked on Spark, he has at times felt discouraged. “I’ve wondered, How do I set these stories on a web site so they are easily accessible to… whoever…to anyone who wants help in communicating the Good News. Although programmers have offered to help in writing code, we’ve not had a system to manage remote programmers.”

How is David helping?

This is where David came in. What specific computer skills has David utilized here as he’s helped Vic and others at the JAARS Center?

“I first worked on a website that describes the project Vic has put together. Next, I began learning Macromedia Flash. I used that to produce and edit presentations for other sections of Vernacular Media Services and for the Museum of the Alphabet. Right now, Daniel, another volunteer my age, and I are working together. Our goal is to build an online system to share resources and information that will help get the Gospel to people in other languages.”

What does God have for David Sampson’s future? He still doesn’t know. But he does know that “I like helping people solve their computer problems.”

And that’s what JAARS is all about—helping people. Helping them get out the Good News of God’s Word to those who’ve never heard it—and often that involves computers.

Thanks, David, for volunteering at JAARS. We need you—and many more like you.