Faith and Fjords: M4 Church Planting Conference

I never had a connection to Norway and now it seems I am surrounded by Norwegians.

A few months ago, I was connected to Øivind Augland, head of M4 Europe, an organization focused on church planting in Europe. Øivind is looking to help the organization develop their media presence specifically getting more and better testimonies from the successful church plants and got connected to me through Scottsdale Bible Church. I was invited to their annual conference in Kristiansand, Norway in June to get a feel for the ministry to consider future media partnership and also to lead a workshop for the attendees on how to make better media with a phone. The conference went well and somewhat ironically, three of the Czechs that were attending were connected to Josiah Venture, one of whom who is on the board of JV in Czech and also an elder at my church in Prague, though I have never had the chance to speak with him personally. He was very interested in speaking more about my vision for media ministry in the Czech and specifically in Czech churches. What I am seeing is that leaving JV is enabling me to make different connections and facilitating different relationships with existing contacts that just never could be realized while inside that organizational structure. You can see a wrapup video about the event here: https://vimeo.com/840565791

It so happens that my network leaders from the media track at the European Leadership Forum are theological professors at the media university in Kristiansand as well, so I got to go visit them and see their school while at the conference. As I build out the media literacy and ministry tools I intend to create in this next season, these contacts are going to be critical colleagues for collaboration especially when it comes to theological debate and accountability on several topics regarding faith, tech, and media.

Several months ago, I started following the development of a game that is being worked on by a Norwegian church-founded gaming studio, Bible X. The game is called Gate Zero and is an open-world first-person game that leads the player through points in the life and ministry of Christ in 1st Century Jerusalem, the highlight being the 2nd Temple. This is an arena I haven't seen a lot of engagement in from the church and so I was excited, especially after playing the demo and seeing the quality of the graphics, which I feel are pretty good. Some of the gameplay reminds me of the popular gaming franchise Assassin's Creed. In a similar manner, you get to run around and discover an ancient city and experience events in history. The company is based just south of Oslo so I reached out to see if I could meet with the team and ask about some partnership opportunities using the game missionally. Natalie and I ended up meeting with the CEO and Creative Director. They were very encouraged at our interest in the game and were enthusiastic at the prospect of translating the game into Czech. Right now they have a defined process for translating the interface and subtitles into other languages and were open to discussing dubbing the game into other languages as well in the future. So as of right now, Natalie and I will be working on translating the game into Czech. Although a lot of gamers know English, and actually learn English through their gaming, having the game available in Czech just makes it more appealing for Czech nationals and opens more possibility for the game to be used by churches and youth groups locally. I think this game has an appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike and the team at Bible X has a lot of future plans for porting the experience to other platforms including virtual reality. I am excited for what this initial partnership will enable and the opportunities it could open up for future ministry tools and development.