When you think of Feba’s ministry, what springs to mind? The radio programmes (in people’s heart languages) that are broadcast on short wave, FM and the internet, right? But don’t forget those front-line workers who answer the phone, SMS messages or website posts from programme listeners.

Working through piles of hand-written letters in the post or an in-box full of email, replying to SMS messages, answering live phone calls and ringing back the “missed calls” – the listener engagement team connect with listeners as they hear their most personal needs. Blessed are the listener response assistants (also called counsellors) for they patiently answer questions about a range of programme topics from health education, farming tips, children’s stories, Bible teaching – the list goes on and on. As you can imagine this is not an easy job – to show God’s love in their conversations, being honest and patient with everyone.

"I don't think I can continue to do this job because I can't do it properly. I want to stop," says a team member. This quote shows the pressures on listener response counsellors; they need our prayers. This person is superbly qualified in terms of attitude and spiritual gifting but for whom the desire to do a job worthy of God makes them discouraged by other pressures of all kinds. To lose such a one would be a disaster and prayer support is crucial.

Many times people from a community will join the team in listener response, but they’ve not had any training. One of the key things that Feba UK’s International Ministry Development team is doing is building capacity at our partner projects around the world through training and developing best practices for reaching out to communities.

For example, at one of our radio projects in south Asia the follow up is done mostly by telephone. And in keeping with the culture, it is important to have a male counsellor for men and a woman counsellor for women. Praise God for Lillian* who has been taking women's calls for several months now and Harry* who became the new male telephone counsellor in June. As they had just jumped into serving in these roles, they were eager to attend training recently led by Feba’s Ed Larby (Media Consultant) and Joelle Morris (Ministry Specialist).

Ed says: “We had a great training day discussing fundamental questions of purpose and outcomes; then necessary attitudes and personality traits; then practical issues of procedures; and finally how to handle difficult callers and tough questions.” He says the interactive training included listening and then role playing – from the basics of greeting callers and making note of their special requests or questions to more in-depth advice on how to interact with different types of situations (people who are angry, talkative, lonely, threatening, theological…).

“We believe that the better we do in our interaction with listeners, the more contact we will have and the more people will listen to the radio broadcasts. Word of mouth is very significant!” says Ed. If 20 new contacts call the team each day (and figuring in recent experience that for every new caller there are about 4 repeat callers) that puts calls per day for each of 2 workers at about 100. And that, of course, is too many for them to handle.

*names have been changed for security purposes