This was not the road I chose 18 years ago when I came to Jesus. I thought I would be a drummer or a vagabond evangelist wandering around the world. Not a computer geek.

It wasn’t even until a few years ago that I began to connect the dots of my attraction to media in college, my desire to write fiction, my aptitude to create things on the computer, and my goofing around with design … that I realize God has had me on this path for a while. Somehow, all this random energy and curiosity about media and web creation has prepared me with a wide competency in two current communication tools: video production and web production.

Who knew? I thought I went to seminary to become a bible professor … not get a theological and biblical background to inform the faith based media I would create.

Since my conversion to the faith, I have wanted to work in full time ministry … it just never occurred to me to do anything but that. In the last 7 years, Kara and I have developed a mutual burden for serving in Africa, while at the same time my appetite and understanding of web and video production have grown exponentially.

Quite honestly, I has been 7 years of Kara waiting for me to find a place to minister.

There are only a few places in Africa where you could base a substantial media ministry that would have global reach through the internet. In addition, I’m committed to seeing Kara use her many gifts and passions in whatever local community we would live. So I struggled for a long time looking endlessly for ministry teams and locations that might fit both of us.

It is in Cape Town, South Africa that we found both of these things. The infrastructure of Cape Town is some of the best in Africa and Media Village is a blessing of a ministry using media in the same way I hope to use it .. and they’ve been doing it for more than 15 years. At the same time, like much of South Africa, the settlements and poor communities are scattered through out the cities needing very much the compassion and contribution of Kara.

Having worked for WorldVenture, a missionary sending agency, for a few years I feel blessed to have seen the inside of how media can be used in missions. I’m been producing web and video for both national and international ministries. And as I’ve dug into my heart for what most motivates me to use media in missions, I find these three basic dreams, or better visions for what I long to see done with my working life:

(Vision 1) Outreach Media that persuades through gospel witness wayward believers and unbelievers.
(Vision 2) Majority World Media which comes along side those in the Majority World to empower their ministries with better communication and train up talented media creators, and
(Vision 3) Revival Media which harvests faith stories from Africa and Asia to encourage Christians in America and Europe with new perspectives on faith, commitment, and God’s working in the world.

(Vision 1) Outreach Media, i.e. to create persuasive media that provokes a curiosity and conviction for Christ in non-christians, and even some Christians.

This is where my inner evangelist comes out. I never would have pegged myself as an evangelist, because the door to door thing has never sat well with me, even though I’ve tried it. But I discovered while working within marketing department at WorldVenture that I love persuading through media.

I love thinking about my audience and linking the core value of what is being presented and the core need hidden within the viewer. In a strange way, it is similar to counseling. Finding the core issue below the surface and using the tools of media to bring a message to that.

I also love experiencing how God guides the creative process, putting ideas in my head of how to say something or how to visualize something in a fresh way.

Apart from my own joy in this kind of work, I believe it is strategic for the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19). I am confident that any global strategy for global evangelism which does not include outreach media as a piece of the puzzel is not in sync with the modern world. Massive urban centers are the new jungles of the world. And media has a unique role in the pre-evangelism, evangelism, and discipleship of these great cities.

(Vision 2) Majority World Media, i.e. to come along side individuals and groups from the Majority World to empower their ministries and train their people.

The obvious blessing for a ministry to orphans looking to expand their network is to have someone come in for a period of time and help them create a few videos telling their story, launch a web site, or set up a child sponsorship system.

This orphans ministry actually doesn’t need this kind of help all year round … though they would of course love to have an on-site media person at their disposal, but they don’t actually need him. The need someone with the skills to come in, set it up, and train people to manage it.

Another example is helping a community development ministry produce a series of training videos to help educate the neighborhoods of health and hygiene. Or again, to help a local bible teacher translate his good teaching into a medium like radio or video, so that more people in his language group can be blessed by his gifts.

These kind of projects can be strategic short term partnerships to help push a good, solid ministry up to the next level of influence. (This is very much how media work happens.)

The task is also, not just what can be produced, but who can be taught to produce. Not everyone who can make a video should make a living as a film maker. Just like, not everyone who can write, should be a writer; or everyone who can drive, should race cars for a living. But for those who have a calling and talent to produce video or web, the unreached world needs their work.

I love encouraging and mentoring young people, and I believe the creative environment provides one of the best situations to access to a person’s soul. Creating something and then putting it before other people for feedback sets at risk our self-worth and our sense of control. More than the content of the creation, it is the process of creating for others that provides incredible moments to speak about our worth in Christ, our motivations for ministry or life, our understanding of grace, freedom and sin.

As an artist and creative person, I’ve wrestled with all of these things myself, and I enjoy deeply being able to speak into the lives of young artists to encourage their faith and confidence in Christ’s work in them and future work through them.

(Vision 3) Revival Media, i.e. to find and tell faith stories from the Majority World to inspire and re-ignite faith and confidence in the gospel among believers in the West.

For most, to say there is a decay of faith in the United States is not shocking. We have all felt it.

Though we have seen great things happen in the faith story of our country, the overall depth of commitment to the faith has suffered. Few of our churches have had a pastor committed to them for more than a few years, let alone church goers. Our culture of convenience has infected us … me.

On my first trip to Mozambique, I met a pastor of a very, very small congregation who told me that he was from Angola (two countries directly west of Mozambique in Africa), and he came to Mozambique at the calling of God in his heart. He knew the deep poverty of the country, and decided to come to minister. Lacking any support, he traveled with only a few dollars in his pocket across the two nations separating his country and theirs to begin a ministry.

Again, on that trip, we worked with students in Youth for Christ who twice during our visit spent the entire night without sleep, praying for the lost souls in their homeland. But even beyond this, these young people would regularly go to their open air markets and preach the gospel, and to their local prison to teach bible studies, and to local orphanages to help with the babies … these kids were in their late teens and maybe early twenties. It blew my mind.

And then when I learned that each of these students went home to live in a one room corrugated metal house with likely a dirt floor which they shared with a large family, and would often miss a meals for not having enough to buy food, I had nothing to say. I felt like I was finally being woken up to the commitment and faith Jesus might have talked about.

Romans 1:17 “For the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith….”

At that point when this trip happened, I had spent 9 years in theological education (4 in college, 5 in seminary), yet I felt like I had just come to understand the gospel both in it’s beauty and power. Their faith opened my faith.

I want to use media as a vehicle to help deliver similar revivals to others.

A. W. Tozer wrote, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."

One application of that very powerful thought is that media as a tool of communication achieves it highest level of service when it competes for a true understanding of God among the minds of the audience. The challenge of creating sanctifying media is a life long pursuit, one that avoids cliche Christian media, which settles for irrelevant surfaces, on one side and Christless media, which achieves excellence and acceptance but lacks any salt, on the other side.