A decade ago in the basement of Edgewater Baptist Church, a problem arose.

Ten young men had gathered to study the Bible, a book which Christians believed to be the inspired Word of God; a book deemed necessary to read in order to faithfully follow their religion.

But in this North Side Chicago church basement, a barrier emerged between the majority of these men and comprehension of this crucial book: literacy.

A leader of the study, Esteban Shedd, mulled over a solution. The answer seemed like an audio Bible, but even if Shedd hurdled his urban attendees’ literacy gap, traditional translations remained culturally distant. However, he thought of an idea to shrink this distance before Bible study the following week.

Shedd held a certain skill set which most audio Bible producers on the planet lacked. Bible study attendees celebrated this skill set enough that he believed it could increase their interest.

“All of them were hip-hop heads, and I was an emcee,” Shedd told Resolute Magazine. “The idea is, we know [hip hop] is dynamic communication, but let’s use this to communicate the Word of God.”

Shedd recorded himself reading Acts 2 and 3 over a pair of instrumentals by legendary music producer, Pete Rock. Days later at Bible study, Shedd tested his new creations on the teens.

“And it was like night and day,” Shedd said.

Pete Rock and the Apostle Peter at Pentecost proved to be a match made in heaven. The same men who had struggled to comprehend Scripture during their previous study stayed engaged throughout. Shedd burned copies of the CD for them to listen to throughout the week. He recognized this as a valuable discipleship tool.

Shedd planned to make disciples for years to come. In 2006, he graduated with a communication degree from Christian college, Moody Bible Institute, located in Near North Side Chicago. And Shedd spread the gospel of Jesus Christ as an emcee for a Latin hip-hop band called “Berto Ramon”. All nine members of the band had met at Moody, named after famed evangelist D.L. Moody, so their lyrics were organically missional.

“Emceeing was always gospel proclamation using many, many different topics,” Shedd said, “but always wanting to get to that point of seeing people come to know Christ, or at least hear of him.”

“Berto Ramon” played in both churches and clubs. The crew’s performances in several battle-of-the-band competitions — including Lollapalooza’s “Last Band Standing”, Verizon Wireless’s “Calling All Bands” and “Emergenza” — garnered attention, which yielded press coverage and international tours.

“There is a lot of garbage out there giving a false portrayal of the neighborhoods. They are promoting negativity,” Shedd, who went by the stage name Boogalu, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2007. “We feel a responsibility to be a voice of people with no voice, whether that’s the shorty caught up in gang violence or a single mother, we are a voice for people who are struggling, trying to make it, and we want to communicate that to the masses so that the people get the right portrayal of what is going on in Chicago.”

However, after the release of “Berto Ramon’s” debut self-titled EP in 2007, the band disbanded after five memorable years together due to different visions about its future direction. Its many musicians with full-time-artist aspirations were forced to reconsider their callings.

“For a lot of us, we thought, ‘This was what we were supposed to do; travel the world and play music for the sake of the gospel,’ and so to see it end was really confusing,” Berto Ramon drummer, Aaron Lopez, said.

The now former “Berto Ramon” members proceeded to pursue different vocations. A handful of them remained in ministry. Lopez started to work at By the Hand, a Chicago-based, Christian after-school program. Shedd joined LYDIA Home, another Christian nonprofit, which cares for families in Chicago.

However, these gigs were not obvious long-term landing spots. Shedd’s sister soon presented one, though: His hip-hop audio Bible.

“Now is the time to do it,” she said.

Shedd agreed. He knew making the project a product would be difficult, but he also knew his vision wasn’t a pipedream. He had witnessed the effectiveness of his audio Bible at a local level.

Shedd recorded a longer, five-track CD and asked for feedback from Joey Rosado, a young man who had attended his Bible study at Edgewater Baptist, and who had enjoyed listening to hip hop more than reading.

The CD could have been longer. Rosado loved it so much he had it on repeat.

“I would overplay it because I thought it was so very unique an experience,” he said. “Never had I experienced anything like that, where you’re able to bump your head to the Scriptures.”

Shedd’s Bible over beats still needed a name, and a street light outside of Edgewater Baptist provided the inspiration. In the gospel of John, Jesus is quoted telling a crowd, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Streetlights became the banner of Shedd’s mission to help young people not read in darkness. He had a name now, but he still needed help.

Shedd shared his vision with Lopez, who also produced records under the name, Moral One. Still in a season of transition, they began to regularly fast and pray together about pursuing not only Streetlights, but also music: “God, do you want this to happen?”

Prayers were followed by beta tests for Streetlights, which were followed by pitches to publishers. But an advocate proved difficult to find.

“We didn't know the publishing world,” Shedd said. “We didn't have a [Bible] translation for this idea, and certain [publishers] were like, ‘This is a cool idea,’ but there was no attention paid to what city folks needed. Then other [publishers] were like, ‘You can get a translation for this project, but you're gonna have to pay us gangs of money,’ basically. We had some pretty bad experiences with publishers upfront where it seemed like all about money and not about even hearing out the mission of it. But it was in a very baby form, as well. Who were we?”

A friend familiar with Lopez and Shedd’s struggles advised them to ask for advice from Scott Grzesiak, the executive director of Christian nonprofit, GRIP Outreach for Youth.

Unlike uninterested publishers, Grzesiak and GRIP cared about the same young, inner-city demographic which Streetlights desired to reach. GRIP served in under-resourced public schools and ran a sports outreach ministry for fatherless teens, so Grzesiak had observed first-hand the literacy problem that Streetlights sought to solve.

Grzesiak not only appreciated the mission of Streetlights, but he also offered to help raise support to start the project. GRIP hired Shedd to launch Streetlights and spend half his time teaching about topics like: abstinence, gang prevention and wise life choices in high schools. There, his burden behind the audio Bible further swelled.

“You're teaching in a really, really tough environment,” Shedd said. “so the idea of the need for Streetlights was an everyday thing like, ‘Man, shorties need the Word of God. They need the Word of God. They need the Word of God,’ from all these different angles.”

Lopez received similar motivation from his continued work at By the Hand.

“I'm doing Bible studies with junior highers in Englewood who can't read,” he said, “and so sitting here in the back of my mind, I'm working on these beta tracks for Streetlights… I'm like, ‘Man, this is ... This [need] is really real.’”

Every Monday afternoon throughout Shedd’s first year at GRIP, he called Lopez on his lunchbreak at By the Hand to pray about “Streetlights”.

Prayer paid off, and the time passed proved worth the wait. A publisher by the name of Tyndale House finally caught the vision of Streetlights. The Carol Stream, Illinois publisher owned the New Living Translation (NLT), the easiest to read, direct translation from Hebrew and Greek on the market. This makes it a perfect fit to assist the illiterate, and Tyndale gave Streetlights the rights to use it.

Prayers were also answered in the form of funding, which allowed GRIP to hire Lopez a year after Streetlights launched in 2010. For the first time, Lopez could devote himself to the production of Streetlights’ first project.

Prayers were also answered in the form of friends. Lopez and Shedd assembled a roster of 30-plus artists and producers to join the effort- many relationships of which resulted from their Berto Ramon endeavours.

One of the many acts that the band performed alongside of was another rising hip-hop group of Christians named Lightheaded. All three group members would ultimately move on to celebrated underground solo careers, as well as contribute to future Streetlights projects: Braille, Othello (now nicknamed Ozay Moore) and Ohmega Watts.

Braille believed in Streetlights’ potential to not only hurdle literacy gaps but also help all listeners memorize Bible verses, which Psalm 119:11 encourages: “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”

“Music in general has a way of helping commit things to memory. It’s the reason songs get stuck in your head,” Braille said, “and so, my assumption would be, regularly listening to Streetlights would aid in Scripture memorization.”

And Braille did more than offer to record vocals for Lopez and Shedd.

Around the same time Streetlights launched, Braille co-founded a record label called Humble Beast with fellow emcee Odd Thomas. Humble Beast then signed Lopez and Shedd as the group Alert (now Alert312) and, in April 2011, they dropped their label debut EP, Red Opus .45. The Humble Beast family of Odd Thomas, Propaganda, Courtland Urbano and more, also played instrumental roles in the creation of Streetlights Vol. 1: Divine DNA, which featured Genesis 1-6 and the entire gospel of John.

In Feb. 2012, Divine DNA dropped.

“Most churches find teaching the Scriptures to be a daunting task in an increasingly unbiblical culture,” Tyler Burns wrote in an article for the Reformed African American Network. “Add to that the difficulty of sharing God’s Word with the illiterate, along with the church’s growing wariness over a tech-saturated gospel, and the difficulty increases. However, there are some who display a keen desire to bear the burden of getting the Bible in as many hands, eyes and even ears as possible. Enter the ‘Streetlights’ urban Bible program.”

This was only the genesis of Streetlights’ work and partnerships.

Lopez and Shedd wanted another former Berto Ramon member to join the Streetlights team as a project manager: Loren La Luz, then a percussionist-turned-counselor at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. But the same week Shedd called him about doing so, La Luz’s manager had already offered him another job as a hospital consultant. This well-paying opportunity had also arose as his wife was pregnant with their second child.

“It didn’t make much sense [to join Streetlights],” La Luz said.

But that same week, La Luz heard a sermon at church preached about heaven being guaranteed for believers and life being short; a call for believers to steward the their brief time on earth. This struck a chord with La Luz.

“My heart was beating out of my chest,” he said, “and I knew God was calling me to do Streetlights.”

Several friends affirmed this calling. La Luz declined his job offer and joined Streetlights as a project, even though GRIP could only guarantee him a few months of pay.

Five years later, La Luz has no regrets. He’s still employed, and Streetlights has been utilized in 85 different countries and become an asset to ministries such as GRIP, Young Life and Youth for Christ.

“This is how the Lord has affirmed me in this mission,” La Luz said, “seeing God’s use of Streetlights globally and how lives have been impacted and transformed, and how many people are using Streetlights as a way to meditate on God’s truth. We know, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, that’s how lives are transformed.”

“Streetlights” was initially a response to a need: Clearer communication of God’s Word to people in hip-hop culture who struggled to read.

“Streetlights” will remain a response to a need (keyword: need).

“If the corners communicate in a certain way and yet we are not producing something that communicates the gospel in that communication lane, we then are making products for another reason,” Shedd said. “I think, deeply enrooted in us, is make something that actually responds to a need and not just a novelty that the church would buy…

“You need to do things authentically to the culture. Streetlights is an authentic expression because it's our culture. It's who we are. And as we expand to other languages and translations, best believe we're gonna be bringing in a lot of other people from those cultures to be a part of producing her because natives have to produce in a native tongue.”

Streetlights has already released projects for the books of John, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John and more.

In the near future, Streetlights not only plans to produce projects for additional languages and translations, but also finish the New Testament, Psalms (“It's really gonna be like a mixtape on steroids,” Shedd said) and Proverbs.

All of this will be available for free through Streetlights’ newly launched app, the next update of which will also feature an expansion of the Streetlights brand: multimedia teaching called Corner Talk.

“We believe we're digital scribes mobilizing missional creatives to translate the delivery of the Word of God to see transformed lives in Jesus Christ,” Shedd said. “That's really our new who we are and mission statement. What flows from that it are audio Bibles because they’re relevant, multimedia tools because they’re relevant, and maybe other tools or products that flow; that are missionally driven.”

Streetlights’s team members believe they’ve entered a second season of ministry. A firm foundation has been laid. Now they desire to mobilize other artists to serve God through the translation and delivery of his Word.

And that delivery Streetlights considers with the utmost care.

“How and why and where do people communicate?” Shedd said. “The delivery is just as important, I believe, as the translation of the words, because you can translate all the words you want, but in our digital age, if you're not communicating where people consume, you're not crossing the finish line because the Word of God is not being engaged. That's where we see our niche in Bible translation — making it in a place and putting it in a form that people are gonna digest.”

After the launch of Streetlights’ new app, an old friend, who once struggled to read the Bible, approached Shedd at church to discuss the expansion. It was Rosado. He told Shedd that, over the past week, he had listened to seven different books of the Bible on the app.

“I’ve used other Bible apps before,” Rosado said, “but they’re very, very dry. Streetlights helped me connect in a way that was speaking my language... It was the same Scripture, but a different language that spoke to me.”

Introductory image taken by Craig Hensel.