New Apostolic Church
International

Zurich. Chief Apostle Wilhelm Leber, the international leader of the New Apostolic Church, will conduct this year’s Pentecost service in Cape Town, South Africa. Some 1.5 million believers in nearly 8,000 New Apostolic congregations around the world will experience this service live via satellite transmission.

Cape Town, 4 June 2006: a big event for the New Apostolic Church. Chief Apostle Wilhelm Leber will conduct a divine service in the congregation of Tafelsig, which will be transmitted by satellite to more than 60 countries on all five continents. The sermon will be translated into English at the altar, and later into more than 20 other languages. Approximately 1.5 million believers will be able to participate in this divine service.

A local Tafelsig production company will record the service on six cameras and transmit the signal by satellite to a receiving station in Cape Town, from where it will be sent on to a receiving station in Raisting, near Munich. From there the signal will be directed to the Verlag Friedrich Bischoff (Frankfurt, Germany) via fibre optic cable and directional radio. The Church’s affiliated publishers will then add more than 20 translations to the original signal. The expanded signal will then be uplinked to a Eutelsat satellite from where it will be transmitted throughout Europe and as far as Northern Africa and parts of Asia. The signal will thus cover a distance of around 144,000 km from its transmission site in Frankfurt to the various receiving stations—which will only take about three seconds.

Transmissions of divine services have a long tradition in the New Apostolic Church. The first audio transmission originating from Reutlingen, Germany was successfully achieved as far back as 1946 over the telephone network. On 5 August 1951, the first audio transmission on a larger scale reached 40,000 listeners at various connected sites throughout Germany using post cable. Over the following years, the system underwent continuing refinement. On Pentecost 1990, a divine service was transmitted via satellite from the Austria-Centre in Vienna to more than 800 receiving sites throughout Western Europe. For a number of years the annual Pentecost service has also been transmitted to the USA and Canada, as well as Southern Africa and South America. Last year, the transmission also included Australia and a number of countries in South East Asia, thereby reaching all five continents.