SAT-7’s multi-language project Reconnecting the MENA to Hope – which is created in partnership with Lutheran Hour Ministries (LHM) – has been receiving fantastic feedback from across the region and has helped many people encounter God’s life-changing love.
“I want to experience the love of Jesus,” said Ezz, a Syrian man who has been watching Heartbeat, SAT-7 ARABIC’s new televised podcast, which forms one part of the project. “I follow your page, and your posts are wonderful. I’m not a Christian, but I love Christ and reading verses from the Bible… I’m searching for real solutions.”
Mona, a teenage viewer from Iraq, has been asking profound questions. “Can you explain more about how I can return to a relationship with God?” she said. “My heart longs for a real connection with Him, but sometimes the path feels unclear.”
Ezz and Mona are two among hundreds of people who connected with SAT-7’s Viewer Support Team after tuning in to Heartbeat’s first season, which covered the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. People are encountering Jesus through the podcast and want to go deeper. In the first half of 2025, 394 one-on-one conversations took place, with 140 of those focusing on the question “Who is Christ?”
Building Faith
SAT-7 TÜRK’s contribution to the project is the new discussion series, Let’s Talk About This. The series is helping viewers in Türkiye build resilient faith in a country where Christianity is widely misunderstood and often unexplored. “The window that I look out to the world from has become wider after this program,” said one viewer who appreciated learning more about the faith.
Clips from the program attracted over 900,000 views on social media prior to October of this year. And the viewership is not only large; it is engaged: the show received over 3,000 comments in the same period.
Let’s Talk About This is covering topics such as marriage and family life, addressing difficult issues like depression and suicide, and discussing core faith questions including “Who is Jesus?” Presenter Volkan Kaysar said that the challenges and struggles of life cause people to ask, “Where is God in all of this?” He says that this is what they are trying to answer.
Everyday Discipleship
“I can understand how the verses [you share] apply to my daily interactions with my family, at work, and in every environment where I find myself,” said Bahram from Iran. He has been impacted by GPS, the practical discipleship program that SAT-7 PARS has produced for the project. “I have watched six episodes so far, and each one has been very fruitful for me.”
“This was my first time watching this program,” said Firozeh, a GPS viewer from Iran. “It was excellent and very beneficial… I had faith but lacked action; faith without action is dead. Watching this program reminded me of this.”
The program addresses the most pressing issues affecting the daily lives of Christians in the Persian-speaking world, while helping them live out their faith in that challenging context.
What Next?
Heartbeat, Let’s Talk About This, and GPS are all looking to build on their early successes, with plans for new seasons being developed.
The second season of Heartbeat will include audience-driven material addressing questions around Jesus’ divine identity, the Trinity, and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Let’s Talk About This, meanwhile, will dig deeper into the more difficult and complex aspects of faith and life. It will include an introduction of fresh elements such as guest interviews, viewer testimonies, and more interactive formats.
And GPS season 2 will be focused on connecting the various dimensions of the Christian faith with contemporary life in the form of a weekly devotional. Each episode will be built around a biblical passage with a specific theme in the broad areas of spiritual and church life, family and relationships, and social and cultural issues.
The Reconnecting the MENA to Hope Project
In 2024, SAT-7 partnered with LHM to launch a project to help people from across the MENA engage with the Bible’s core teachings and grow in hope and faith. In the last 12 months, three of SAT-7’s channels – SAT‑7 ARABIC, SAT-7 PARS AND SAT-7 TÜRK – have each been airing a different theology program, supported by LHM’s Project Connect booklets, topical resources that help people follow Jesus in their specific context. Each channel has tailored its content to its unique audience, language, and culture, while selecting booklets to adapt and contextualize.
