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HIGH POINT — Just about everything fits in a single suitcase, out of necessity.

“We’ve got it down to a science,” says Karl Hengeveld, who travels overseas with recording equipment to dub voices for translations of a film depicting the life of Jesus.

The high-profile evangelism effort, the Jesus Film Project, is a mission of the international nonprofit Campus Crusade for Christ. Based on the book of Luke, the film already has been translated into more than 1,000 languages, including tribal dialects. Organizers are eyeing another 5,000 languages, based on the biblical mandate to spread the Gospel to everyone.

For 26-year-old Hengeveld, whose family lives in High Point, that requires traveling the globe. These days, he focuses on Asia and Africa.

When Hengeveld’s team arrives in a project area, the search begins for locals to speak the parts. It can take months of work to dub the 83-minute movie. And, lots of improvising — using that degree in computer information services Hengeveld earned in 2005 from High Point University.

“Sometimes we use a professional studio and sometimes we have to build our own with mattresses and pillows and whatever we can find,” said Hengeveld, part of a group of about two dozen that mostly travels in twos or threes. “We want to get a clean and clear sound and sometimes that’s hard — we don’t want roosters in the background.”

The work is essential because it’s the only way some people will hear the gospel of Jesus Christ in their own language, said Greg Tyrrell, Campus Crusade’s travel team leader for the Jesus Project.

“I’ve heard most missionaries will use the Jesus film because it’s the best tool they can pull out of their tool kit — it’s probably the only film about Jesus made in some languages,” Tyrrell said.

Hengeveld is back in High Point visiting family, but also raising money to support his work. Employees of the nonprofit must raise their salaries and expenses. As of this week, he needs to raise about $1,000 a month in pledges.

“When I decided to do the Jesus film, I was like, ‘God I want the biggest bang for my buck — I want to affect as many people as I can,’ and this is where he led me,” Hengeveld said. “If we do one language, like Romanian, 23 million people have the chance to hear the Gospel in their own language. That goes way above and beyond any one-on-one thing I can do for anyone. God really answered my prayers in putting me here.”

An Andrews High School graduate, Hengeveld first got involved with missionary work at Community Bible Church in High Point. One of seven siblings, his father is a middle school math teacher and his mother operates an in-home day care.

Right out of high school he went on his first mission trip to Guatemala and fell in love with the work. “Everything just started to make sense to me as far as faith goes — about being forgiven, about having a relationship with Christ,” he said.

Hengeveld got involved with Campus Crusade ministry in college, and joined the staff full time in 2007. He is one of two people on the film travel team from North Carolina; the other is Krystal Fullwood, a graduate of Smith High School in Greensboro.

“I’m gone about six months a year, but it’s ‘gone two weeks, back for five,’ ” Hengeveld says. “We take the time to do the voice-overs and dub, as opposed to subtitles, because over half the world can’t read or write. The film would be useless to over half the planet.”

The project includes several stages, but first involves getting the original script translated on paper into the new language. Then Hengeveld’s team travels to the selected area to find people who speak the language.

Nearby is always a translator to make sure there’s no “ad-libbing.” The key is getting the pace as close to matching the on-screen actor’s lip movement.

Then there’s keeping an eye on overzealous local law enforcement, who don’t always want the team to be there.

“We are pretty careful about where we go and what we do there,” said Hengeveld, recalling a trip to a location in Central Asia, when the local police put his team under house arrest three days before they were scheduled to leave. “Technically, we ran away.”

Hengeveld is accepting invitations to speak at local churches — and he is seeking donors wherever he can find them.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com