Deaf/HOH (v02)

Deafness is Booming

Baby Boomers massively changed each landscape they touched since 1945. In the 50s, churches and schools swelled. In the 60s, it was high schools and colleges. In the 70s, joblessness swelled because of too much labor and not enough jobs. In the 80s and 90s, boomers ignited the economy. In 2010, boomers began to retire and drive health care spending. This means that the generation of The Beatles, Led Zepplin and KISS are managing tinnitus and the like, and churches that prepare for this generation and their iPod children and grandchildren are investing well.

How: Live ASL for Your Church

THINKING MISSIONALLY:

"We don't know of a deaf believer in our area who can sign our preaching and teaching."

SOLUTION: Hire a non-believer to translate! Sure, he'll initially struggle a bit to get his theological vocabulary in place, but think about this as an evangelistic outreach, and this translator is not only a vendor to the church, but a captive audience. Touche!

If you have a team of ASL (American Sign Language ) interpreters, wonderful. If you don't , ReSermon can help. This next point is key: Even if you don't have a single person in your congregation who needs an ASL interpreter, you still need an ASL interpreter. Only as recently as 150 years ago, many deaf and hard of hearing people were misdiagnosed as insane or mentally retarded and committed to asylums to whither away. Thankfully, much has changed, but deafness still breeds its own unique isolation. Many deaf children in the 19th and 20th centuries grew up "sounding deaf" and were bullied, teased and emotionally scarred for something they could not control. The deaf, therefore often retreat into their own subculture, where isolation can turn into community. If you care about the deaf and hard of hearing, then you have to take a page out of Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. If you provide live ASL to your sermons and then advertise this through the community, they will come.

ASL Translation and Closed Captioning

ReSermon can not only broadcast the ASL translation and closed-captioning of your sermon to your overhead projector, but to the entire congregation through their smart phones, laptops, and tablets.

ReSermon offers real-time closed captioning for live sermons, as well as embedded captioning for video and audio files hosted on your website.

A Note to the Big Church

ON-SITE ASL & CAPTIONING: An ASL translator physically stands in proximity to the preacher or teacher during translation. If you do not have an on-site team for this, ReSermon can help you book this resource.

OFF-SITE ASL & CAPTIONING: ReSermon can contract off-site translation to be connected to your preaching and teaching in real time via internet feed. Including ASL translation for your video and audio sermons is not only serving the view of the moment, it is a viral way to broadcast that you are reaching out to dear/HOH people, and they will share your materially virally.

One advantage to sign language is that it is, of course, visual, and you can see communication a lot further away than you can hear it. However, older deaf/HOH people are also losing their sight (like the rest of us), so embedding your ASL translator in your off-state monitors could prove helpful. Consider the configuration of your particular building structure for this additional value.