Ears to Hear: ORU Alumni Produce Groundbreaking Audio Bible
“I can’t believe no one’s done this yet.”
These are the kinds of words that spur action, and they’re words that did just that in the lives of Ann White and Kathleen Cooke.
White is the Founder and President of Courage for Life, a ministry devoted to strengthening, equipping, and empowering women, especially women who are experiencing fallout from abuse, neglect, and mistreatment.
“She began working with women at risk and in prison,” Cooke recounted about White. “She wanted to give them more than just a hygiene kit and a smile; she wanted to give them something that would change their lives. And we know the Bible is the source of that.”
Initially White and her team began to distribute printed Bibles to those women they were helping, only to discover that, for a variety of reasons like learning disabilities or the recipients being “slow learners,” those Bibles were largely going unread.
So White decided an audio Bible was the solution, only to run into an unexpected problem.
“When you’re working with at-risk women, you have to use gender-specific treatment,” White said. “You don’t send a man in to speak to or counsel a woman who’s been abused by a man. We knew [the Bible] needed to be read in women’s voices. I just thought I’d go out and find one, we’ll negotiate with whoever has it, and get this into the hands of the women for free. [But] it just wasn’t there.”
“I was shocked!” White continued. “I prayed and mentioned it to my ministry director who’s currently over our prison ministry, and I said, ‘Can you believe there’s not an all-women-read audio bible out there?’ And we both couldn’t believe it. I knew instinctively that’s what we were supposed to produce.”
Courage for Life had already hired Cooke Media Group, a communication and media company owned and operated by ORU alumna Cooke and her husband Phil (also a Visiting Professional in Residence with the University) to develop their organization’s branding. Cooke, A 1977 ORU graduate with a double degree in Special Education and Elementary Education, was ecstatic about the opportunity.
“Being an actress, and my husband with his production company, we knew it had to be done well,” Cooke said. “So we contacted [producer and ORU alum] Amick Byram, enlisted his help, and started collecting top actresses who would be willing to come in and read the Bible.”
“The quality was really important. If we couldn’t get it right, we weren’t going to do it,” White said. “We knew we wanted it to be an evergreen product that was timeless and well-produced, something that sounded like you were listening to your favorite aunt or grandmother or sister you loved dearly.”
To accomplish this goal, Cooke and her team cast a wide net to find top-tier voice talent that wouldn’t just be articulate in their performances but who would also support the mission of the project.
“We wanted to honor God’s word with clear, loving, compelling voices,” White said. “Women from different backgrounds, different voice types, different ages. There’s something for everyone.”
The New Testament was soon completed in its entirety and made available through its own app. The team is currently putting the finishing touches on the Old Testament and anticipate its availability later in 2020.
“It’s been a wonderful project to delve into to bring God’s word in a female voice,” Cooke said. “As we’ve developed it, we’ve had more and more men’s prisons contacting us asking if we’d give them this women’s audio Bible. Because these men have been traumatized by men in their past as well! And they’d prefer to hear the Bible read by women!”
The Courage for Life audio Bible is currently being utilized among many traumatized people, largely in various state prison systems, but though it has its beginning among marginalized inmates, Cooke and White believe it will break through and bring healing on a much larger scale.
“I feel an excitement, in that I believe God’s going to use this in bigger ways,” Cooke said. “I think doors are going to be opening wider and wider in the future for the use of it.”
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash