Media Missionary Focus

Upgrade Faith

In the wonderful world of media production, computers have taken over. We produce all of our video and audio projects digitally; our video footage is shot on a digital camera is stored digitally on computer hard drives, our audio projects are recorded straight onto a computer hard drive through a 8 channel digital audio interface, and all of our editing is done computer based non-linear editing systems. It’s really pretty incredible what you can now do.

Digital, computer based editing has been around for awhile. Our regional media office for the Assemblies of God World Missions department is located in the Philippines, and they bought their first digital editing system almost ten years ago. To do it they had to buy a specially built computer, as well as the editing software. All in all, if my memory serves me correctly, it ran them about $40,000! Just this past year, they stopped using that system. They now have gone with a new digital editing system that uses a pretty standard PC (although it is admittedly a high end system) and an editing program that runs about $600. So for a tenth of the cost, they are getting better performance and results. We use the same system here. The problem is upgrades.

I actually use a number of editing programs; for general video editing we use Vegas, for video compositing we use Ultra, for authoring DVD’s we use DVD Architect, for creating interactive DVD’s we use eDVD, for detailed audio editing we use Sound Forge, for music creation and editing we use Acid, and for shooting new video we have just started using DV Rack. And of course I also have a wish list of other software and hardware that we would like to get in the future. But that also means I get a ton of upgrade offers every month. In fact, this past week I spent $200 for an upgrade on 2 of our most used programs. Sure that’s a lot less than I would pay for a new program, but it starts to add up. It seems like every other week there is some new breakthrough or some new format that requires another upgrade. So where do you draw the line? How do you decide if the latest upgrade is really necessary?

This is actually a pretty common dilemma that it seems most Cambodians struggle with. The amount of building going on around the country is amazing. There are new houses, stores, restaurants, hotels and businesses going up on almost every major street in Phnom Penh. But at the same time, you can drive down the street and see places that were beautiful showplaces two or three years ago that I would now consider to be a real dive. The typical pattern here is that someone puts a lot of money into building this great place, and then they run it without any ongoing upkeep investment, and within a few years it is run down, worn out, and ends up closing because people don’t come back. The business that keeps re-investing and upgrading their facilities is the exception here, not the rule. Most don’t understand the long term necessity of ongoing investment, maintenance, upkeep and upgrades.

The same thing goes in the video and audio media world. When we first came to Cambodia 11 years ago you couldn’t get a DVD anywhere; everything you bought in the market (i.e. all the pirated movies) was on VHS tapes. Likewise, everything we produced was analog media on VHS or cassette tape, and editing was done with a number of physically connected SVHS tape machines. Now you would be hard pressed to even find VHS tapes in the market. Everything is DVD, I couldn’t give away our old SVHS editing system if I tried. If we had not invested and stepped up to producing digital programs, we would be out of the game. And even though the upgrades I am currently facing are incremental advances, if I were to ignore them I would be left behind in a few years. Does all this affect our day to day ministry? Yeah, it actually does.

One way it has impacted us is that now media in general is much more accessible here, so more missionaries and pastors realize the value of Christian media in both evangelism and discipleship. So we have a lot more people regularly partnering with us. The other way it impacts us is that we are trying to not only keep up with the change, but move to the front of the wave and be a part of leading future trends and direction. So, for example, that means that at the Cambodia Cassette Bible Institute we are looking at MP3 digital format for the lessons to use in possible internet download formats. It means looking outside the box of what has already been done and finding new and innovative ways to bring the gospel to people in a way that captures their attention and their imagination.

And faith is no different. In about 8 days we leave for a missionary retreat in Thailand. What is the point of going to meetings and retreats and all that? It’s the same as the need for maintenance and upkeep in a business; without continually re-investing, things begin to break down, get run down and eventually close down. Why do you keep doing daily Bible reading if you have already read the entire Bible (probably more than once)? Well, why do you paint a room, even when in the past it has already had a number of coats of good paint? Because if you don’t it gets dull and dirty and starts to crack and flake off. So you keep reading the Bible because if you don’t you faith starts to get dull and dirty and cracked and starts to flake off. Face it, life is all about upgrades.

So every couple months I shell out a couple hundred dollars for the latest version of whatever software it is that is offering an upgrade this week, and every so often I find myself at the alter, “paying” whatever it cost for another faith upgrade (for those fluent in “Christianese” that means “seeking the Holy Spirit for a spiritual refreshing”).

posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 10:10 AM