No letters after my name. Free to be me.
This video comes courtesy of the Collide Magazine and their snazzy new website. I get a lot out of mulitmedia and appreciate really good work. And this is good:
As it was succintly put on the Collide website, the video would be even better if there was a point to it all. Fair comment. But great video nonetheless.
If you don”t visit churchrelevance.com, you should. Kent Shaffer runs a great blog on “training people to reach other more effectively.” I link my posts to his site more than any other blog and today he has provided another great post.
Many medium to large churches can afford or have the talent pool to create custom made graphics and video resources. For the rest of us, we need to rely on the God given talent of others and the generosity placed in their hearts to share what they have.
Church Relevance has a great post here, outlining free Christian and non-christian sites as well as linking to some Christian sites where you need to pay for resources.
Here’s my rant though, why would these large churches charge for their content when they are raking in the money? Call me cynical but when I see much smaller churches and ministries given stuff out for free, it makes these large & charging churches look like parasites. Anyway, I have told myself not to be so critical so I’ll go and scream in a room with egg carton insulation.
My favorites listed at churchrelevance.com include:
creativemyk.com is a new and growing site offering a image related resources. Be sure to check it out and visit often as new stuff is being added all the time.
LifeChurch.tv This is a Church I really like in regards to it’s philosophy of sharing materials. They have a tonne of material ready to go for you to use in your church or small group setting.
But my new discovery via churchrelevance.com is a ministry called Muddy River Media. This website rocks and, after registering, provides a bunch of material available for free download. They host their previews on YouTube and here is a taste of what’s available:
Medical Science: I couldn’t resist this one as I make a living flogging products for bleeding disorders:
Vine & Branches: One of my favourite topics in the Bible.
Worship Background: Those of us in the media ministry know how hard it is to spice things up. Well have a look at what this site does to spice up things for free!
I really enjoy the growing move within Christianity to share resources. After all, we are one body. When’s the last time your heart said to your leg, “Hi dude. I’m gonna charge you $2.00/liter of blood I supply to you!”
C’mon Christians! Spread the love and talent around!
It’s always a good thing to come across quality Christian media. The three clips below are an example of some of the work coming out from a fellow Aussie’s imagination and God given talent.
The next clip come with a warning for people with epilepsy - mainly due to the rapid changing of pictures. So if you suffer epilepsy, just go onto the last one. If not, I hope you enjoy.
And this last one is my favourite. It’s always a fascinating experience to see how our God uses the weak in life to accomplish his plans and goals. I hope you watch it and are blessed and humbled by our position and our potential in Jesus.
Like I mentioned in a previous post, I believe we need to present the awesome message of Jesus is a way modern culture can relate to. These video’s are a great example of such work.
If you come across great work, please let me know as I am planning to build a library of video’s here.
Being human in the western world these days makes you a prime target for visual and audio assault. It seems as if every moment of our day we are exposed to media. Be it advertising, TV, music, computers, books or radio.
Try a little test for me and see how long you survive in a day without succumbing to some form of media. You won’t last very long. Media assaults our brain with information almost all of our waking hours. We are saturated by it and some of us, myself being a prime candidate, can’t live without it. Even as I sit here typing, I am away on a business trip and have my iPod blaring away while I sit typing away on my laptop. We live our lives as a by product of being totally assaulted and being “made alive” by our senses constantly being bombarded by noise.
And then we have the audacity to ask someone to sit still and listen to a stranger to preach to them for an hour or so on a Sunday morning talking to them about a concept so foreign to them that they simply can’t understand nor wish to engage in.
No wonder it’s getting harder to engage people these days. Modern western society has a mass form of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and going to church to listen to someone preach to them is simply “so yesterday” that the whole concept of Church is dead before it even begins.
We need a paradigm shift on how we deliver the timeless message of the Gospel. In a society where all visual and auditory senses are bombarded with such high frequency, our timeless message is being triaged to the “irrelevant noise” section of society’s mindset.
It’s ironic in a way that the most important message to get out to people is the one that most people can’t even register. The reason for this is that the delivery of the message is still stuck in ancient times - a preacher talking.
What I propose is that we deliver the message of the Gospel using increasingly multimedia methods. The world screams images, video and sound? Fine. We need to do the same. The world is becoming increasingly online? Fine, we need to do the same. The world is delivered information in bite-sized snippets (albeit cleverly crafted)? Fine, we need to do the same.
Paul, even in his day, had insight into all this:
“For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.” 1 Cor 9:19-23
The gist of the above is, “I need to connect to people where they are in order to get the message of the Gospel out in a way they can understand.” This may well mean, getting rid of all denomination talk, getting rid of ‘Christianese talk”, shelving your KJV bible and popping open The Message and sharing it with someone, replacing the organ in your church with a drum kit. And the list can go on.
There is nothing wrong with any of the above. But when we act like this in front of people who don’t believe in Jesus, we look like whackos. And whacko’s we are not. We have been entrusted with the Gospel of Jesus - the most wonderful news mankind could here.
But one area I think the Church needs to excel in is in the area of relevant and engaging multimedia which assaults the senses just as well, if not better, then the typical stuff we are exposed to every day.
How many times do you watch “Current Event” shows talking about how TV commercials tend to be louder then the programs? Truth is that they are not louder. They just pack more information in their allotted timeframe and bandwidth and our brain registers them as being louder.
As the multimedia guy at my church, I’m going to pursue a more vigorous multimedia approach to what we do. Then our message will be on a level playing field to what our people hear and see everyday. And maybe, just maybe, our voice is heard a little more.
Of course, all this cannot compete with the power of God as He decides to reach out to people. But this has been tugging on my heart for a while now and I believe I have a roll to play in reaching the masses by becoming “all things to all people.” After all, Paul did the same thing. I often wonder what his missionary style would be in our culture today.
By going to the core of society in Athens and addressing the philosophical leaders in Acts 17, he went to the core of society’s influence. These days, media influences people more then they care to admit. So that’s where I aim to go.
A practical example of how this plays out is having media presentations at church, hyped up with music/sound and lyrical content delivered fast paced and with loud volume. We compete for the attention of souls bombarded by the same things from people who only want their money.
We want these people to want Jesus. We owe it to our King to “be all things to all people” and if that means stepping out of our comfort zones to contextualise the Gospel to modern society, so be it.
What you have said