Phil Cooke over at The Change Revolution recently wrote about speaking to the International Mission Board media team in Richmond, Virginia. The media team is responsible for documenting, filming, and creating media for and about more than 5,000 Southern Baptist missionaries in the field.
The Full Gospel and Word camp of the Body of Christ doesn’t have anything like that. Virtually all of the Full Gospel churches today (except for the Assembly of God) are mom-and-pop operations that work hard to meet their already-low budgets and send any extra to foreign mom-and-pop churches and itinerant preachers. Despite the American hype, most ministers do not drive Bentleys and wear a different Rolex every day of the week.
My wife and I have sort of created our own little International Mission Board media team (something I’ve wanted to do for a long time). In October we will be flying overseas for the purpose of filming and documenting an independent Christian orphanage. A young woman started the orphanage eight years ago with no church support and no money. Today she has over 40 orphans that are trained in the Gospel and has a school with about 500 or so kids in it. By the end of the year, we hope to put together a museum-quality book that the ministry can use to raise funds and give to its regular supporters (I don’t know that a Full Gospel ministry has ever had this done before).
My wife and I have already committed our own time, equipment, and money to the trip. If you’d like to help out, you can click over to the Giving page and make a donation. Just about any amount donated will be helpful. For example, a roll of film costs about $5.75 and processing is about $3.50 (with airfare, lodging, etc., film is our cheapest expense).
We’ve promised the ministry that we will bear all of our own costs for the trip so that any profits of the book will go straight to it. And by the way, if anyone is interested in getting in on the book’s print run, please let me know. If the ministry can find a donor to fund a print-run, then all of the book sales can go directly to the orphanage (wouldn’t that be great?). We also expect that the ministry will be able to use the photographs in a mult-media presentation in local churches, but all that is down the road.
[Note: I’m not identifying where exactly we will be going due to security concerns. We hope to publish some of the photographs on this site once we return.]
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