About the Recordings
The History of the BFM Tape Recording Service
 

In 1954, at the suggestion of Len Canning, Arthur Rumsey began recording the teachings of Charles Welch on reel to reel at the Chapel of the Opened Book. This great work formed the Berean Forward  Movement, Tape Recording Service (TRS). Today, John Porter who saw the need to digitalize these fragile recordings, with the help of Jeff and Fred Doak, transferred all of the expositions freely to the Internet.

John writes:
"The TRS made open reel recordings available for sale or on loan but as cassettes gradually became popular, we also made cassettes for sale or on loan. The loan library of cassettes was soon passed over to Marjorie Marple and she has been handling requests ever since. In 1993 we realized that the original reels had a limited life. They were becoming brittle and the leaders were often detached. We did not want to make replacement open reel masters because open reel recorders were becoming difficult to obtain. Fortunately we chose (or should I say, our Heavenly Father knew the necessity) to go digital, and purchased a SONY DAT recorder 77ES.

Due to time spent digitizing the literature, not many DAT masters were made at first, but in December 1999 it was felt that the time had come to have a big effort to make DAT masters of all the recordings in our catalogue. Of course, our heavenly Father knew that in the Spring of 2000, Jeff Doak would inquire whether we could help him in his desire to get the expositions on the Internet. By then (Spring 2000) we had a head start on the Doak family.

It was a tremendous thrill to me when I first switched on my computer and heard Mr. Welch's voice coming over the Internet. The computer was next to the DAT machine on which only a few weeks earlier, I had copied the DAT which had been sent to Fred Doak. Here was technology being used to the glory of God. To think that, with the right equipment, a listener anywhere in the world could hear the Word of God being expounded, was cause for much praise and thanksgiving."

More than 2200 recordings of various teachers are available for purchase.

We are thankful to the Lord for this ministry and the TRS for their efforts in providing these recordings to the Doaks so that these precious studies may be heard all over the world.

<C. Welch

Email