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Hari’s Story

In October, a colleague and I headed off to Bulgaria for ten days to shoot our first “God Story” video.  A short documentary about how God is at work — in this particular case about how he is working in the life of one Bulgarian man to see many people come to Christ.  It’s a huge ambitious project which is still ongoing.  However, in an effort to maximize our resources, we’ve already been able to complete several smaller related projects using the materials from this shoot.

While we worked on the documentary, another one of our colleagues put together this compilation of footage for a meeting of Greater Europe Mission’s board.  It does a nice job of capturing the flavor of Hari’s ministry.

Hari in Bulgaria (2 minutes and 8 seconds)

We also posted an article about Hari and the trip to GEM’s website.

Finally, while we were there, Hari asked us to produce some training videos on how to use the Evangecube in Bulgarian — since it’s proving to be a tremendously effective tool in rural eastern Bulgaria.  So we produced these five videos, all in Bulgarian, each with a slightly different focus.  I was also able to use this project as a training project for our Graphic Design intern who wanted to learn a little bit about video production.

Be warned, all of these videos are in Bulgarian. 

Long Version  || Short Version || Muslim Version 1 || Muslim Version 2 || Instructional Version

Reach the World

Probably my favorite part of this year was working on this video.  The goal was to demonstrate the vast differences in culture and belief that exist in Europe and the tremendous potential that exists here to reach people from all over the world for Christ.

Reach the World  (2 minutes and 15 seconds)

We had an intern working with us on the project and he put together a great glimpse of some of the work that went into this.

Behind the scenes

Creation to Christ

Creation to Christ or C2C is a 15 minute Gospel presentation where you share the entire story of the Bible with someone so that they can see how Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of all that God intended from the beginning of time.  This fall, our graphics team put together a fantastic series of beautiful visual aids to accompany the presentation either as part of a booklet, or on your smart phone.  They also set up a web site where you can get the visuals installed on your phone for free.  You can see one of the visuals on the right, or go to the site and see them all.  If you’re interested in reading the Creation to Christ story, there’s a PDF file you can download here.

“First Steps in the Faith” Discipleship Book

Our graphic design department also put together this wonderful discipleship booklet for use by new believers in Portugal.  My Hope is a televised Billy Graham crusade that aired this past December.  Believers were challenged to invite friends and family into their homes to watch the television program together.  At the end of the program, they shared brief testimonies and invited people to accept the Gospel.  The “First Steps in the Faith” book was put together in conjunction with My Hope  to provide a study in Portuguese for those who accepted the Gospel following the program.

Zaporozhye Bible College and Seminary

We did a massive project this year for the Zaporozhye Bible College and Seminary.  Our graphics department designed a new logo, some lovely printed materials and a new web site for the school, while a colleague and I flew to Ukraine and produced a promotional video in Russian.

You can see the video here in Russian.  (3 minutes and 23 seconds)

We also put together an English Version, but be warned, this was really made for a Russian speaking audience, and it does not translate very well.  Particularly the music and voice work carry a very different message to westerners.  English Version

Here is one of the new ZBCS brochures:

And a sample image from their new web site:

London 2012

GEM is working hard to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity that the 2012 Olympics represent to reach people for the Gospel.  So a GemStone team was dispatched to London to capture some of the exciting preparations going on there, and interview some key strategic partners.

London 2012 Promo Video (3 minutes and 5 seconds)

Supplementary Interviews:

Henry Deneen, GEM President || John Burns for “More Than Gold” || Andy Flannagan || Peter Farmer from “Simple Church”

Steve Smith Training

Steve Smith from the International Missions Board travels all over the world teaching an evangelism technique called Training for Trainers or T4T.  GEM worked together with Steve to have a T4T seminar in Basel, Switzerland, and GemStone was asked to capture all ten days of Steve’s training in a multicamera video shoot.

I worked the technical details, doing the planning and problem solving work to make the event possible, before stepping away to greet arriving family for Brittany’s high school graduation, and then the rest of the team stepped in to do the heavy lifting of capturing the conference.

What Would It Look Like?

A good chunk of my year was dedicated to animation work.  You can see some of that in this video that we put together as part of a three prong recruiting strategy for our headquarters.

What Would It Look Like?  (1 minute 21 seconds)

Support Tools

Our graphics department has put together a fantastic array of themed support raising materials for GEM missionaries.  Missionaries need only submit a photograph and a few paragraphs of text, and they receive back a professional brochure, book mark, prayer card, powerpoint background, blog banner, and email banner in a theme of their choosing, each carefully matched and beautifully designed.

Visual Story Network Summit in Edinburgh

In April, I traveled with a colleague to Edinburgh, Scotland, for the Visual Story Network Summit.  The Visual Story Network is a Christian organization started by the Jesus Film project, but now a separate entity, working on bringing all the Christian Media producers together from all over the world, and get us coordinating our efforts.  It was a great opportunity to meet other people doing similar work, and begin to form partnerships that will help us be more effective in the future.  I went both as a participant and to coordinate and run the audio video for the summit.  Many of our 2012 plans have their roots in things that happened at VSN. 

Story Training with Tom

Tom Khazoyan, the producer of the feature film “The Enemy God,” graciously donated his time to lead a week long story-telling workshop for us in April (before he flew on to Edinburgh for VSN).  It was a great and intensive time as Tom helped us through the creation of our first short film script.

Any Given Day

The first of our ambitious animation projects for the year involved thousands of names floating in a bathtub.  It was a wild concept, and a lot of work, but has born a lot of fruit over the course of the year as many many people have watched it on the internet and been challenged to consider the short time that we have to reach the lost people around us.  It’s been exciting to see God using this video in places and ways we never imagined when we were putting it together.

Any Given Day (1 minute 14 seconds)

How2Video.org

At the beginning of this year, we put the final polish on the How2Video.org web site and launched it, first to friends, then to the mission.  Later thanks to promotions by the Visual Story Network and Missions Catalyst now thousands of missionaries have visited the site and gotten the word that this tool exists to help them produce their own videos and share how God is at work in their lives and ministries.  If you want to make a video of your own, I encourage you to check out the site.  The training is simple and down to earth.

Perhaps the greatest upside for us in GemStone Media has been the great freedom it has given us to really pursue God’s calling.  Now when someone comes to us with a project that is good but a distraction from God’s best plan for us, we can say, “We can’t produce that for you right now, but we’ve got a great online training program so that you can produce it yourself.”

www.how2video.org

A plethora of excitingness has been happening the past four months- and it’s high time for a written report. I was introduced to the Greek Bible College opportunity kind of in the same way an assassin’s target finds out about a planted time bomb minutes from detonation. The amount of time given to consider the situation is so small and pressurized, the tendency toward self preservation has less time to kick in, and a braver course of action is usually taken…God knew if I had too much time to think, I would have stayed home and implemented my home-school-college-for-a-year-via-online-courses-plan. It would have been the worst decision of my life.

Since being here, so many blessings have followed. The opportunities here are so many, together they weigh more than a couple universes. The staff are primarily responsible for that. All of my professors (colloquially) are “beasts” for God. They’re a group of delightful, intentional, and wise people who’ve earnestly been studying the Lord and His word for most their lives (many of them with the bible’s original languages under their belts- how cool is that?!). Accordingly, I’ve been hoarding up vast amounts of…information doesn’t seem to be quite the right word, since the majority of what I’ve been learning doesn’t feel academic. To say it better, I’ve relished and cherished the lessons of Evangelism, Old Testament Survey, Inductive Bible Studies, Corinthian Correspondence, and Theology courses (I admit I may have been a less than excited student of Ancient Greek, but we get on tolerably. ) . I’ve never loved school more or rather, school has never felt less like school before.

And those are just the academic blessings! I’ve shared the joys of experiencing a new country/culture with classmates who were hand-picked for this year by God. Within the first week, we were treating each other as sincere life-long friends. Together we’ve seen the ruins of Corinth and some of the Athenian wonders- for example the Acropolis and Mars Hill. I confess, we’ve even tested and approved a few picturesque Aegean Sea beaches. Through hands-on projects for the Evangelism course, and projects of our own, I’ve been witness the Holy Spirit stirring people’s hearts for Christ. Every Monday night, I take part in a ministry that serves dinner to over 200 refugees for free. It’s easily the best night of my week- seeing so many hungry, broken people filled up with good food and a message about humanity’s Savior…

Yes, the opportunity for the Greek Bible College was a time bomb- it’s exploded into a radical, life changing, mind blowing, heart shaping, fun oozing time. If this doesn’t teach me that God knows best and that being a Christ follower is the most incredible thing I could ever do in life, I don’t know what would…

…The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you,

~2 Timothy 4:22

Brittany

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus, Acts 1:8

Thus begins the evangelization of the nations. The Apostles would spread the word throughout the ancient world, poor fisherman became great orators, the lame were healed, and even the dead were raised. We’re in Germany today because Christ told his followers to be “witnesses … to the ends of the earth.” But how often do I expect the Holy Spirit to really act with power in my life?

Last month, God sent a colleague and I to Bulgaria. We heard many people were coming to Christ around a little town just north of the Greek border. We went because we felt called, but had no idea what we were in for.

Over the next eight days we tried to capture the life of a man, who met Jesus in a dramatic vision like the Apostle Paul, left behind his successful secular career to become an evangelist, lives modestly on the income from selling his paintings, and has visions from God guiding him nearly every day. We’re not talking about generic dreams that could be interpreted a variety of ways, these are specific directions from God to be performed immediately in most cases.  At one point, while we were with him, God shared the names and in one case the personal story of some Turkish laborers on the side of the road that he was then able to use as an avenue for sharing the Gospel.  At another point (not while we were there), Jesus appeared physically to this man and gave him instructions.  To me, even as I write this, it brings to mind the televangelist charlatans we are all too familiar with and yet this was the furthest thing from that.  We saw how time and time again, the directions he was receiving from the Holy Spirit led specifically to a specific individual who was open.  Through this man, many Bulgarians are coming to know Christ. It was a fascinating, and challenging week. When we asked him why so few believers hear from God, he said he thinks they’re not listening, because it is impossible that God should be silent.  As i considered how difficult it often is for me to hear from the Lord on major decisions, I was stuck by the simple faith of a man who listens to God for direction on every tiny step.  Could it be that it’s so hard to hear from the Lord simply because I don’t wait for Him to make every decision, but only let Him make the big ones?  Is the struggle simply that I don’t practice being a good listener?

We’re now working on taking the material we shot and creating a documentary sharing a little piece of this man’s story.  We hope you’ll join us in prayer that his story will lead many people to more fully commit themselves to living for Jesus, and listening to the guiding voice of the Holy Spirit.

View on Vimeo.

View on Vimeo.

View on Vimeo.

A woman armed with an automatic weapon has shot dead one person at a hospital in Germany before being killed by police.

A police officer was also injured in the incident in the town of Loerrach near the French and Swiss borders.

Police believe the shooting is linked to an explosion at a nearby building where they found the bodies of a man and a child.

Authorities have sealed off the area and say the situation is under control.

The shooting happened shortly after 1800 local time (1600GMT) on Sunday.

It sounds as though the woman killed her son and life partner just before rushing into the hospital to kill a male nurse.  Please be in prayer for the community in Lörrach.  There is always a chance in these tragic moments for people to turn to Jesus.  Pray that God will use this tragedy for his glory.

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