Global Recordings and Joy Ridderhof

Dear Phyllis,                                                                                                  November 30, 2014

Last Tuesday we were invited to attend the75th anniversary of Global Recordings and the 15th anniversary of its being in Thailand. Gospel Recording (the original name) was started in 1939 by Joy Ridderhof. Joe Carroll used to say, he wondered why most of the great men of God that he knew were women. Joy Ridderhof was certainly one of the greatest female men of God of our time. She started an organization that has undoubtedly reached a wider spectrum of people with the Gospel than any organization in history.

Joy first went out as a missionary to Honduras in 1930. She contracted Malaria and was forced to return to the states. Being unable to get back to the mission field, she had a great burden how to reach the souls in Honduras that were dear to her. The movie industry and recording industry was just expanding in the 1930s and she learned of a studio near her home in Los Angels that would make recordings for individuals. She invested her life savings of about $25 to make a recording of the Gospel to send back to Honduras to play to her friends that they might get saved. It was through this initial investment that she got the vision of making recording in different languages to be a means of witnessing to people in difficult areas, that otherwise had no chance of hearing the Gospel.

I first met Joy when I was with Joe for their annual Bible conference in Los Angeles in 1964, and later became a reasonably close friend. I was sitting with her one night on the porch of her home that was very close to the center of downtown Los Angeles and asked her, “How did you ever get this place?” She said that was her fathers farm. Her father's farm was what is now the center of Los Angeles, and that was the headquarters for Gospel Recordings.

From the original concept of making records on 72 RPM black disks, the technology of recordings evolved in some ingenious ways. If they wanted to reach unreached tribes in remote places on the earth, they had to have some means of being able to play these recordings on something different than a phonograph or a record player. It is pretty hard to buy batteries in the heart of the Amazon or the Tibetan plateau so they had to have something non-electrical.

The simplest means was what they called the talking card. It was nothing more than a piece of cardboard folded in thirds. There were no wires or anything electrical in it. On the bottom third there was a small pin (post) where you could place a record. You stood the rest of the card board up like a tepee with a small needle on the end of one side. You could place that needle on the record and spin it with your finger and it would talk to you. The one side of the card board acted as the speaker. You could pack hundreds of these cards with records in a box, carry them in the heart of the jungles, and naked savages could hear the Gospel in their own tongue. That would so intrigue them that they would spin those records listening to the Gospel by the hour.

They had another high tech device that was no less ingenious but bulkier to carry. They had a small wooden box with a turntable on it. Inside was a simple gear mechanism that you turned with a crank on the side. There was a fly-wheel inside that regulated the RPM of the turntable. No matter how fast you turned the crank the speed was always the same. On top of the box there was a arm that was very similar to the original gramophones. On the end of the arm there was a small speaker with a needle on the end. As you turned the record, the needle would make the paper speaker vibrate that would produce the sound. You could hear the recording quite clearly. In remote villages these talking boxes were tremendously popular as people would listen to the Gospel in their own native language by the hour.

Producing the records was the trick. This required an army of courageous missionaries. A recordist missionary would go into an area that was totally unreached by the Gospel and locate someone who was bilingual in both the language of the recording and the tribe they wanted to reach. The recordist had prepared scripts of messages he wanted to record. He would have the native speaker read those scrips and record what he was saying. There were a number of messages that they would record ranging from the story of sin, the Cross, the resurrection, coming judgment, creation, the Flood, etc. The recordist would get these messages recorded in the language he was targeting on a portable tape recorder. He would send that tape back to Los Angeles where technicians would take it off the tapes and make records out of them. The records were very simple plastic disks made by volunteers in Los Angeles that would get shipped back to the country targeted. Missionaries could then carry those records and the talking cards or boxes into remote areas where these tribes or minority groups lived and distribute them. The natives were delighted to have these miraculous talking gadgets and play the records to hundreds of people by the hour. To date Gospel Recordings (Global Recording) has reached over 6,000 tribes with the Gospel message. Can you imagine that? The Lord alone knows how many million have been saved through these simple records.

Of course, church planting and lasting evangelism is much more involved. Mission organizations, like Wycliffe Bible Translators, and New Tribes Mission, send in missionaries who reduce the native language to writing, then translate the Bible in that language. From there Bible are printed and serious, evangelism, and discipling takes over. All of that is necessary to get the Gospel to the nations of the world. But for those small tribes and unreached areas where the population is too small to print Bibles, this is about the only way of getting that message to those people.

Joy Ridderhof was an amazing woman of God. GR has carried the Gospel far beyond anything that we could have imagined. Let's do our part in telling our neighbors who speak our language about the wonderful salvation of our Lord Jesus.

                                               bill