June 2022 Ministry update

To E-Learn or not to E-Learn

I have continued working on our new eLearning project. This project was designed to move lecture portions of our trainings online to a more at-your-own-pace learning environment so precious in-person time could be used for discussion and relational engagement with our staff and partners. I am happy to say that this project is starting to wrap-up, at least when it comes to my foundational building portion. By the end of this month, other missionaries should be able to create, enroll, and manage their own courses and contacts in the eLearning environment. I am working on the Czech specific portion of the environment but JV is adopting this Europe-wide and I received this note from the JV coordinator the other day. "I’d love to see how it looks on your end as you get these running. I feel other countries are going to want what you’re doing." This initiative has the potential to save ministries and churches thousands of dollars and hundreds of cumulative hours in travel and open up trainings to more people who would not be able to travel to trainings or would be prevented from attending due to time constraints and increase the quality of the time we do get in person with our trainees and church partners.

Media Network

I have been meeting with several media professionals and building a roster of individuals who would be interested in being a part of or supporting what I am calling a media network in the Czech. The main goal of this new initiative would be to connect, encourage, train, and disciple students and young media and tech professionals together and foster an environment where they can thrive and serve the Church and the Gospel with their gifts and passions. It is a unique subgroup within the church that is desperately needed but who is often treated as order-takers within the church and not developed as unique servants of the Gospel. I am starting to work with a young pastor named David Nitra who is the online church pastor the CityChurch network and we are developing a weekend intensive/conference for the fall/winter designed to help people launch personal evangelism ministries on social media. I see this as a small, achievable first step towards this larger media ministry.

In Media Res

Since returning Europe side, a few other media projects have popped up. I am currently finishing filming. In the fall, I connected with a young Czech pastor named David Živor who is heading up a church plant in my area of Prague. I initially helped him by leading a few outreach focused English clubs but have since been working to develop a promotional video for his church. He has also introduced me to several media professionals, including his brother, which will be very helpful with the media network. Some of my colleagues at EXIT Tour have recently transitioned to starting a new ministry at Josiah Venture called Worship.co. The goal of this ministry is to train and disciple youth who have a desire to lead worship at their churches as well as train and inspire young musicians in the church to write their own native Czech worship songs. A lot of the worship music in Czech is either very old or translations of modern English worship songs. As part of this, they are creating music videos and tutorials of Czech worship songs with their creators and compiling those and other resources for Czech worship leaders online. I am helping them with the filming and editing of these video materials but we all see a huge opportunity for cooperation and mutual inspiration between their project and the media network in the future.

Connective Tissue

Since the COVID restrictions are starting to abate, we have been able to go back into in-person gatherings, which includes conferences. I helped lead the tech team on our first national conference back in April. I also got to see a the friendly faces of a team from Scottsdale Bible Church led by Rae Larsen who do child care at our in-house family conference in May. Although, I did not get to attend this year, I was able to stop by the European Leadership Forum during a setup day and see many of the SBC team serving there as well. These encounters definitely help the faith world feel a lot smaller and more connected.