Church Video Ideas: Media and Missions

Orginally published on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 7:00 AM
by Greg Atkinson

The church that I’m on staff at (Bent Tree) is the most mission-minded church I’ve ever come across (and I’ve traveled the country visiting all kinds of churches, plus been on staff at previous churches). We just finished 2 weeks of our annual “Missions Festival”, which takes place each October. I don’t have the time right now to tell you more detail about it, but you can check my blog for a description of what our Missions Festival entails. It was amazing. I am thankful to be a part of a church that has a heart for the global Church!

For this article, I’d simply like to share how we used video to give our congregation a glimpse of what we’re doing around the world with our 6 strategic partners: Russia, Cambodia, The Amazon, India and 2 in Africa. We flew out 2 key leaders from each of our partners (we say that we’re “Bent Tree here” and they are “Bent Tree there”) to share what God is doing in their country and through their ministry. Before each spoke we showed a highlight video that we produced to allow you to get a taste of what it’s like over there.

Our church is constantly sending teams of people to visit, work with and train our partners, so we have pictures and video from each of them. Our video ministry, headed by the multi-talented Aaron Bensko, went through hours and hours of tapes of video footage and thousands upon thousands of pictures. We sorted through all that with the help of an outside video editor (from BlueFish.tv) and put together a 2 minute overview video for each parter (6 videos). These videos included amazing and unforgettable scenes of what our partners are up against and the kind of living conditions that they experience. We had a mixture of background music, voice overs (reading a script our Outreach department created to tell about the ministry) and interviews with leaders in those ministries.

Another special treat for our church that we did on the last Sunday of our Missions Festival was to give each family a copy of a DVD (which was a year and a half in the making) containing in great detail how Bent Tree is involved with our adopted people group – the Marathas in India. The DVD featured interviews with our people that had been on a trip to visit our ministry there, as well as captivating interviews, testimonies (we call them LifeSongs) and more amazing footage captured by Aaron, from his trip over there.

This year’s Missions Festival (we are told) was the best one to date. I’m extremely proud of our video team, Communications and Outreach departments, which worked together to give our North Dallas congregation a small taste of the world that our partners live in. It was also our mission to allow God to use these videos as tools to encourage everyday people to take the next step and sign up for a short-term mission trip. Also, our church believes strongly in dedicating a large portion of our budget and building campaign funds to our mission work, so we wanted our people to see what their dollars had been used for. Via the magic of video, our people could actually see churches we had built, schools we had built to train pastors and Church leaders, dorms we built for those leaders when they stay at the school, motorcycles we gave the graduates of one of our Leadership Institutes so they could get around their community and on and on.

As I said in the beginning I was inspired, encouraged, challenged (I want to visit all 6 of our partners on their turf) and proud to be a small part of one church that believes God has given us, as churches and Church leaders in America, tremendous resources to share with our brothers and sisters around the world. This is only the beginning, at least for me and my fairly new role as Technical Arts Director (this was my first Missions Festival). In the future, I’d love for us to try speaking to our missionaries on the ground via phone, web cam and satellite. Who knows what’s in store? I’d love to hear your story. How have you used video to create awareness of missions and outreach in your church?

©2007 – Greg Atkinson (www.churchvideoideas.com)
Used by permission from author. All rights reserved by author.

Greg Atkinson lives in Dallas with his wife and their three small children. Greg served previously as the Director of WorshipHouse Media, after having served as a worship pastor for 11 years. Greg is now the Technical Arts Director at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship and continues to consult, teach and write about worship, media and creative communication. You can connect with him through his daily blog, Church Video Ideas, his podcast, Creative Synergy, or his email: . 

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