Last month we had the opportunity to help the Lao church set up their own small scale recording studio. Their leaders recognised the need for new music to be written that reflected the heart and experiences of the Lao people and requested that we go over there and help them get started. I took one of our audio engineers over with me and we spent a week together with several of the musicians and leaders of the church. By the end of the week, we had set their studio up, trained a couple of their guys in recording, and arranged and recorded six songs. It was exciting for them to see the melodies they had written transformed into real songs, and their vision to write and record their own music come to pass, and it was exciting for me to see neighbouring countries start to work together, and impart into each other’s work and vision. It is the beginning of a series of projects we will do this year to help establish and equip national churches in neighbouring Asian countries start to use media more effectively in their work.
Over the next year GenX Media Group will begin production on its very first feature film- to be shown in secular cinemas and sold in secular markets. The movie is called “The Hidden Inheritance.” It is a secular film with a bridge to the gospel that Christians can use to witness to their friends. It is essentially a film written to address the common misconception that all roads, all religions lead to Heaven. The story is a metaphor of three grown up children chasing the inheritance that their father left them - one follows the father’s instructions and the other two try to find short cuts, which lead them astray.
This project has been a year in negotiations with AP Media and Sword Productions - based in the Philippines. We finally had the opportunity to sit down together last month and complete the final negotiations to do the film project here in Cambodia.
These two Media groups will support GenX with training, resources and finances to pull this off. It is a big project and will be the first time that Cambodian Christian artists have had the opportunity to share their Christian world view with the secular community. We believe this is just the first of many opportunities we will have to share our faith, love and Christian worldview through cinema.
Churches are more and more waking to the fact that Media is one of the most effective servants of the 21st C church. Here in Cambodia it has taken many years for churches to accept media as a valid tool in evangelism, discipleship and as a way for Christians to express their faith to the world and to God. We are starting to get more and more opportunities to use media to serve the growing Church here.
Recently we started producing our third radio drama series. It is another kids' radio program and through a series of humorous interactions between a child and his aunty, they get to travel the world through all sorts of weird and wonderful modes of transportation to hear testimonies of miracles that have happened in the lives of children all over the world.
We have also been asked to write and record new praise and worship music for the Cambodian church, some in more traditional Khmer style and some in Khmer pop style, so that the songs we sing are relevant expressions from the Khmer people to God - rather than translated songs from other countries. We just released an album of new music the end of last month.
Jime is a young man who lives in a province called Takeo, about 45 minutes out of the capital city. He is a poor man, who lives with his mother. His father died many years ago and he was left to fend for his family. He is a Christian and around 2 years ago God called him to plant a church. Jime came to our church planter training last year where he also learnt about community development and Micro Enterprise. At the end of the training he took a small loan and bought a cow to raise and generate income for his family. He is one of the many people who could never have accessed a commercial loan. He has no collateral, no savings, and no education. Everyone in his village knew his situation was pretty hopeless. When he came home one day with a cow, the villagers all began to wonder where in the world he got the cow from. Jime would proudly tell people “God gave it to me, God promises to provide for us, and he never forgets to fulfil his promises.” About a month ago I went to visit Jime and his cow in his village where he has started a cell church. He was beaming as he told me how this cow had changed everything. Not only did people respect him now - he has his own small business, and he had made a success out of a pretty hopeless situation, but he also got so many opportunities to witness to people in the village, because of this cow. After a while it became obvious that there were serious problems with this cow as it failed to get pregnant - people started to tell him that his business would fail - his cow was worth nothing. Jime told people it was a cow from God - what God provides is never worthless. He began to pray that God would turn this situation around, and after several more months, his cow finally got pregnant. Now he has a little calf too. Jime now shares not only about this God who provides for us, but this God who performs miracles in our lives. Jime shares the gospel with authority in this village and Jime’s cow is his constant companion and living object lesson of God’s love and God’s power in his life.
Spending time with Jime was one of those rare refreshing moments, where you see someone so grateful to God for the things he provides, and so dedicated to living for God and serving God with whatever one has - as little as it may seem.
Where would life and ministry be without Miracles?
• Please continue to pray for our city church team, as we get closer to starting this new church. Pray for the team and that the finances we need will come through.
• Praise God for always supplying for our needs. God has performed several sizeable financial miracles in the last couple of months, providing funds for several of the projects we had coming up this year, through Churches, Christian businesses and Ministry groups.
• God provided a teacher for my foster kids and a neighbour kid to be home schooled. These kids were rejected by both state and private schools here due to illness, and were therefore unable to attend school. They just started home schooling a couple of weeks ago.
• April - Church planting seminar; we will train 20 new church planters in leadership development, community development and business development. This will take place in Cambodia and two other SE Asian countries.
• May - First tech and actors training for up-coming feature film.
• May - Thai media project; a community event about living with HIV Aids.
