Media Missionary Focus

Blogs and Coffee in the morning

As the sun slips over the horizon across the world, millions of bleary eyed people shuffle through their homes toward their kitchen looking for a little morning clarity in a cup of fresh coffee. I'm no exception. But today, and for the last few days, I have been shuffling across town for my coffee.

As I write this I am sitting in a Panera Bread Company store in Springfield, Missouri logged on to their free high speed WiFi internet service waiting to talk to my wife and kids back in Cambodia over a free internet based telephone service called Skype. The world is changing! When My wife Lisa and I first went to Cambodia in January of 1994 we didn't even have a phone. We lived in the eastern province of Kompong Cham where we ran an orphanage of about 120 kids. For us to talk with someone in the USA we would first have to drive 3 hours to the capitol city of Phnom Penh, then hope that the phone at our mission's office there was working. If it was we could call the States for about $8 per minute. If someone was calling us it was between $6 and $4 per minute. Internet and e-mail where non-existent. Now, we live in Phnom Penh where we work with media ministries (helping the church to produce evangelism and discipleship materials in both audio and video formats). This week I happen to be in the States working on a video project, but Lisa and our two boys (Dmetri who is about to turn 9 and Alex who is 7) are back home in Cambodia. But thanks to the modern marvel of computers, the internet and the coffee shop I am able to talk to them every morning for free!

So why have I gone through explaining all that? Didn't I say yesterday that we were going to talk a bit more about why I am doing this blog? Well, that's what I am doing! Today a generation of people are growing up with the ability to communicate almost instantaneously around the world, and they want to see an immediate impact from what they are doing. If they give to missions they don't want to wait a couple of months for a newsletter that the church secretary will hang on some obscure bulletin board somewhere in the church. They want immediate feedback and interactivity. After all, they can now publish their own media world-wide. It could be text based like this blog, audio based, like the rapidly growing "podcast" trend, or video based webcasting. But whatever the format, it has become so simple that they can do it all while they are sitting in their local coffee shop, drinking a cappuccino, and they can do it all for free! Why should they expect any less from us? We spend time, energy and money to learn the language and culture of the people in the country we go to so that we can communicate to them in a culturally acceptable and meaningful way that they can easily understand. Shouldn't we do the same when we communicate back to our supporters in the States? So I'm taking a shot at it.

I hope this also starts to give you a picture of my family. We will definitely come back to them more later.

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 7:21 PM