Ministry

On Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of radio listeners were shocked when radio news alerts announced the arrival of Martians (the "people" from the planet Mars). They panicked when they learned of the Martians' ferocious and seemingly unstoppable attack on Earth. Many ran out of their homes screaming while others packed up their cars and fled.

I am not bluffing. It was the The New York Times headlines. (check here)

Though what the radio listeners heard was a portion of Orson Welles' adaptation of the well-known book, War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, many of the listeners believed what they heard on the radio was real.

And I want to tell you, the power of media is astonishing. yes, ASTONISHING.

Maybe you would say, that was 70 years ago! Nowadays people are getting smarter.

Then you are wrong.

Unless you can explain to me how a novelist could make so many Christians worldwide giving up their religion using a made-up story, and a movie with that made-up story.

Yes we have Dan Brown and his Da Vinci's Code.

I can give you many more examples, but I'll stop here. What I want to tell you is: people who want to make money have used media to earn big money, people who want to gain fame, people who wants to convince public with their political ideology, people with all kind of purposes have used media to achieve success, but too bad, I think Christians are not in this category.
In fact, to me, gospel has no, or very little impact and success in using media to rival other influences. Of course, sometimes people are simply rejecting gospel contents, but I also believe there are many rejecting because our music, our animation, our comics, our videos, orr movies, or games are not attractive enough to send a message to the public.

This gives me a burden to start a studio to cater this need: to produce evangelistic resources that non-Christians like and think is good.

Because when you like something, that thing can give you influence very easily.

Now I shall explain this idea of mine in details:

There should be 5 departments in this studio:

1. Department of Softwares
This is the department mainlyfor programmers, and perhaps also graphic designers. The main duty of this department is to produce useful and effective educational softwares for students, especially students who are really weak academically. My youngest sister is my inspiration for this idea. She was in a big primary school with lots of students in a class, and she often is not a fast-learner. And the way the teacher teaches obviously doesn't make her feel interested in learning as well, and sometimes I was really surprised how weak she is in academic aspect that she couldn't understand even very simple things, especially in science, math and languages. This department has a task to produce softwares that can really help weak students by very detailed and illustrated instructions, or for students in general, to help them to understand what they are learning, rather than just helping them to score in examinations. For example, you could probably do differentiation and integration really fast and accurate, but you probably have no idea how the idea began, how it was derived and how it can be implemented in your daily lives to solve problems. The softwares to be produced are most probably not good enough for people to score straight As, but they would be really useful to make students understand and acquire the ability to argue and to think, something which is really lacking in exam-based education system. It also helps weak students to build a strong foundation before going into harder topics in school. And in between the tutorials, exercises or educational games, some short messages of gospel would appear, indirectly giving influence to the users.

2. Department of Games
It's called the department of games, and yes we are making games. Programmers are still important here, and besides that, graphics designers are also very important. We'll be creating free games for computer and cell phone. And when the game was advancing to another scene or level, or when the game is loading, short messages of gospel would appear.

3. Department of Music
We'll need musicians, audio engineers and composers for this one. We want to make free gospel music that are not so "gospel". We want to adopt music styles that are more familiar to the public, but with lyrics that speaks gospel.

4. Department of Animation
Animators and graphic designers, script writers and directors, we'll need you. With 2D and 3D animators, we can produce many Jesus-film-like animations to save many souls.
On the other hand, we can also produce non-gospel animations but with hidden evangelistic meaning or just a simple gospel message at the end of animation. Sometimes we do not really need stunning graphics, just look at how successful cartoons like spongebob, south park, Doraemon and Shin-chai are, or short video clips like Happy Tree Friends. However, too bad, most of those mentioned are always giving negative messages to the viewers.

5. Department of Creative Evangelism
We also want to use our creativity or resources to help other churches or organizations. Also, we can help them to design or create new strategy in evangelism. For example, for Campus Crusade of Christ, we could help them to restructure and redesign the 4SL booklet, e.g. there can be some blank pages at the beginning of the 4SL booklet for people to write or paste their own testimony. For Full Gospel Businessman fellowship, we can create "offline evangelistic radio station" CD for them, that they can play these CDs when they are driving a non-believer. What is the difference compared to a christian radio station? Firstly, there are many countries where Christian radio stations are not available. Secondly, christian radio stations are for Christians, while evangelistic radio station are for non-Christians.
It'd be great if the work of evangelism can expand bigger through co-operation like this.

Most important of all, we want to provide all these for FREE! Because we don't want to allow piracy problem to be a hindrance for these products to be widespread. Also, we want to produce them in mainly chinese before translating to other languages, as you know, there are really not many good resources in chinese, and we want to "attack" the market of the country with most population in this world - China!

I thought the motto/slogan for this studio can be "Broadcasting creativity" or maybe "Broadcasting gospel of creativity". Because we do not just want to tell (a few) people, but we want to broadcast them to (a lot of) people. And we want to take a different approach, something which is not typical "gospel" and "Christian" like what you have always seen which people quickly snub without taking a second look, but creative one that suits today's needs better.

Even if I can't start this as a full-time ministry in the future, I'll still try to work on this in my free time. I am now trying to learn all these things...programming, animation production, music production, composing songs and graphics design, and I wish I could produce a good product in each category before I graduate, so I'd be able to find sponsors for this ministry I am dreaming. Even all these things do not work out, I still hope with my little effort I will still be able to influence some people using Internet as a medium, or hopefully inspire others into doing the same things, or partnering with me.

Thank God for the advancement of freewares and open-source softwares, I can actually do all these without spending a dime on those popular big-name-softwares. :)

And you can support me in this by:
1. Prayer!
2. Money (if things ever work out in the future)
3. Your skills or your ideas/inspirations (Don't worry if you were not "born with talents", you don't need them, God gives them :) ask me for info on how you can learn these skills on your own!)
4. Your friends - you can introduce these products to them.

If you are interested to be part of this by supporting in any of the 4 means above, you can give me an email or text message and let me know :)

And it would be great to have comments, suggestions and feedback from you as well.

All glory to God! :)