When we founded Clear and Simple Media, we had a rather limited target audience in mind. We wanted to put tools into the hands of grassroots church planters in Vietnam to help them get new believers started on a solid theological foundation. Since the beginning, we have tried to write in a style that is linguistically simple, theologically clear, and biblically faithful. Those commitments, as it has turned out, have allowed the material to be useful in places that we did not anticipate. The books have been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide. People are using the materials in ways that we hadn’t considered.

In central Tennessee, a new drug and alcohol rehabilitation ministry was launched late in 2018. The facility is a short-term residence program that is a feeder program to Teen Challenge, a nationally recognized recovery program founded in New York sixty years ago. The program is a biblically-based recovery program with an emphasis on discipleship. The course of study includes significant time learning the scriptures and helping the participants (all men in this facility) build a biblical worldview.

The director of the project looked over our book Simple Truths and said, “This is a perfect fit for what we are trying to do.” Today, we delivered several sets of our books (Simple Truths, Simple Stories, and Travel Guide to the Bible) to their ministry resource library. The coaches will be working through the content over the next days, integrating the books into their discipleship curriculum.

Because the CSM books use a simplified English vocabulary and writing style, the materials “will be a great help” to many of the men whose addictions have limited their educational development. Since many of the men have little or no background in the Bible, they are a new target audience that we will now keep in focus as we write new materials in the days ahead.

One of the men from Be the Bush Recovery Center receiving CSM books at Jehovah Java Café.