Tag Archive - GiveBack

RetroPost: Initiating Contact…

September 23, 2010 in being christian, featured artists, GiveBack with 1 Comment

After talking with FeaturedArtist: Troy Rowe last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of artists helping out ministries and missionaries… Here are some thoughts from June 2009 about artists initiating contact (with annotations in orange)…

"This is Joe, let me tell you his story..."

"This is Joe, let me tell you his story..." Tree by brionnasweetie2 on flickr

Do you know any missionaries… personally?

I remember the very first conversation that I ever had with a missionary… I was 11. The conversation was about Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which had just hit theaters. He was excited about the movie and I was feeling very mature because a bona-fide grown-up was having a conversation with me.

One minute we were debating whether Darth Vader was lying about being Luke’s father… the next minute, we were talking about hand-carved jewelry from Sri Lanka and how selling it was changing the socio-economic landscape of the village where he worked.

It’s been like that with virtually every missionary that I’ve known or talked to… They simply can’t help but tell their story.

Let’s help them…

Phil Cooke observes that “branding” is the visual hook for your story (in his book, Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Non-profits Impact Culture and Others Don’t).  What a number of independent missionaries need is a branded presentation that provides audiences with a visual hook. For a skilled graphics designer, this isn’t much more than a doodle. I work with a missions organization that recently had a pro designer volunteer to rework the branding… it has had a tremendous impact.

The other thing that could really change the impact of a missions presentation is a video or some quality photo images.  We’re going to talk later in the week with a student filmmaker who has put together a brief documentary-style presentation for a missionary.  Watch that video here. It presents the vision and mission in a powerful and engaging way that makes a great opener for the missionary’s presentation…

I mentioned poor photo quality yesterday and I wanted to touch on that again. Church groups that go on mission trips should take a photographer and let that be her designated job for the duration of the trip. I have been trawling through Flickr.com, looking for mission trip photos to invite to our Flickr Friday slideshow. There are LOTS of photos of the “people on the team” but almost never any with the missionary and very few good shots of the people being served. In other words, the photos are for the home church, not the missionary. I met a guy on Flickr who goes on missions trips with his church as “the photographer” and I’ll be sharing his story in the FeaturedArtist slot sometime in November…

This is where the focus needs to change and this is the practical reason that the artist should initiate contact with the missionary.  We’ve got to find out what his story is… then we’ll know which photos to take, what footage to grab, which of the people being served has a story that the missionary likes to tell in presentations.

The other reason that we need to initiate contact is spiritual… Artists have so-called critical thoughts like, I could take a better photo than that one, often because the Holy Spirit is speaking to our hearts about a need we can fill in that person’s ministry. Initiating contact becomes a matter of obedience to God.

In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31-46), Jesus makes it clear that once we become aware of a need, we are responsible to meet it as if it were Jesus himself in need. These missionaries that we’re talking about live that out in their daily lives and we can contribute to that work in ways that are empowering and engaging.

And remember that offering the works of our bodies as living sacrifices is our own spiritual act of worship (Rom 12:1)…

Are you getting any ideas?

RetroPost: Missionary Slide Shows…

September 21, 2010 in being christian, featured artists, GiveBack with 1 Comment

June 2009… I launched a regular feature called GiveBack, with a series of articles about how artists can help ministries and missionaries tell their stories. After talking with FeaturedArtist: Troy Rowe last week, I was thinking about this again…

"I want to tell you a story about Joe. He's the little boy on the left... the one looking at the camera... can you see him?"

Bring a missionary with a compelling story into my church for a presentation and I am almost instantly reduced to a blubbering wad of tears and snot… It doesn’t matter if they have slides or media or authentic costumes… I am drawn into the stories.

I am the exception… not the rule.

Most people, especially in the US, are over-stimulated by media.  So, if the presentation is dull or too long or not visually engaging, they check out about 45 seconds into it.  And we’ve all seen that mission trip picture: underexposed foreground that makes the 4 African children playing in the street 100 feet away look like tiny, black specks.

Take a quick look and go back to text-messaging your girlfriend… and totally miss the amazing story of Joe (third speck from the left) and how he came in dying from malnutrition and malaria three years ago…

Great stories + lousy media = boring presentation.

So, in the minds of church-goers there are basically 2 types of missionaries: interesting and boring.  The interesting ones raise lots of money and the boring ones struggle to get the support they need to make ends meet.

Ironically, the interesting ones often get the support of a couple of rock bands who end up raising money for them so that they can keep doing the work of their ministry… But the boring ones tend to spend a third of their time going from church to church asking for support which comes in the form of pathetic, little love-offerings.

The sad thing is that the boring ones almost always have a great story to tell.  They just need a little help in telling it.

And that’s where we come in…

We’re artists:  photographers, graphic artists, media designers, filmmakers, songwriters, indie bands… The visual and emotional flash that these missionaries need to engage their audiences, hold their attention and get help for Joe and other kids like him… it’s just a “doodle” for us.  Seriously, a day of pro-bono work from you could make the difference for a ministry that provides food for street children in India or an orphanage in Uganda.

THURSDAY: Why artists should make the first move…

FeaturedArtist: Troy Rowe…

September 19, 2010 in featured artists, photography with 5 Comments

Most of my connections to the artists we feature on WOP are virtual: we connect through Flickr or Twitter or Tumblr and bat emails back and forth. Then we talk on the phone for about an hour and I share the results with you guys…

Troy is different… I know Troy very well… in real life.

Sitting down over Chick-fil-A sandwiches, while my daughter terrorizes the boys in the playland, we talked for a half-hour about projects that we’re working on at LVC, our families and painting his house.

Troy has this off-grain sense of humor that makes me vaguely uncomfortable in public… He doesn’t mind being the center of attention… It totally freaks me out. He’s one of THOSE people who has never met a stranger, while I’m one of those people who learned to never talk to strangers…

After several years and a number of outings with him and our kids, I’m more accustomed to the way he reaches out to everyone he encounters… He’s charming, really… But being in public with Troy is still very similar to the experience of riding on a parade float…

So, I wave helplessly at the passers-by and ask my questions.

I already know quite a bit about Troy… He’s been interested in photography since he was a small child, growing up in Michigan. His first pictures were captured with a MagiMatic camera; images of the outdoors and Canadian geese whose heads were often out of frame. He studied later at the Art Institute of CO and spent a number of years working in a portrait studio before starting his own business about 2 years ago…

I have worked with Troy at LVC as well… He does free portraits for guests at our Night in Bethlehem event and has submitted work for our galleries. He has also done work for 2=1 (a marriage ministry) and CO-AID (a non-profit that does work in India and Haiti).

What I’ve been wanting to share with you guys for a while is Troy’s work with Shiloh House, a foster-care home for boys that have difficult and often troubled backgrounds…

He shared his vision with me more than a year ago:

…To photograph the boys at Shiloh House… To affirm them in who they are by portraying their hearts through imagery and portraiture (that) uses their ideas…

Which is the sort of thing that Troy does with high school seniors and brides-to-be and other characters he meets… His portrait work begins with building a relationship with his clients, finding out what they like and who they are; then going out to locations where they feel comfortable and shooting pictures…

There is a strong sense of collaboration with his clients… Capturing their loves and aspirations and stories is as important to Troy as getting the light and composition right…

Relationship is vital to his work and that personal understanding comes through in the images he captures… His portraits are intimate and compelling…

He has been working with Shiloh House, shooting their events, as a part-time member of their volunteer staff…

It seemed to take forever to get through the paperwork and training. They do background checks and training about interacting with the kids… It was quite a process…

I had the opportunity to be around while Troy was doing a shoot… His outgoing nature is at its best in these situations to draw out his subjects, to make them feel at ease, to be their friend…

No doubt, this is a tremendous experience for boys who come out of poverty, neglect and abuse…

You can see more of Troy’s work on his website: www.TroyRowe.com or become a fan on Facebook.

All of Troy’s images are copyrighted and used by permission.

FlickrFriday: Child of God by Travis Silva

August 27, 2010 in being christian, GiveBack, photography with 0 Comments

Check out Travis Silva’s (Forgiven! on Flickr) mission trip images from Gulu, Uganda… Beautiful and poignant images of children living in poverty…

If you photoshare on Flickr, join our group.

On Missions and Martyrdom…

April 13, 2010 in being christian, devotional with 0 Comments

What are you called to give?

I just completed a fairly substantial redesign of the website for an organization called LifeChange International… They partner with missionaries on 4 continents to serve the needs of people and share the love of Jesus… I’m very pleased to be involved with the organization and happy to help them use social media to raise awareness of the work that they do.

My first project with LifeChange was working with Jack Fairweather at Arise Ministries in Manila, the Philippines.  Arise has opened an orphanage outside of the city proper, where they take in kids off the street and give them a safe and loving home… I first wrote about Jack when we launched our GiveBack feature last summer… You can read those articles and see a video about Arise by following this link.

The funny thing is that I know Jack and his family… his daughter and mine are the same age and went to each others birthday parties before they sold all of their worldly goods and moved to the Philippines to live in a dorm with a dozen or so homeless, street kids.  I had talked to him about that move for six months and it still kinda stunned me when they actually did it.  Now we Skype occasionally and I think of him as “my friend in Manila.”

Jack and his family have given themselves to God in a very literal, measurable way that many of us never will.  Even for me and my wife, as we move back into church staff ministry, the sacrifice isn’t as “real”… We still have a nice home, two cars, other stuff we like…

I wonder how I would respond to the call of God that Jack has on his life…

OR EVEN MORE POIGNANT, a woman in our church named Semsa (say: Shem-sa) Aydin, whose husband was martyred for his faith in Turkey in 2007,  shared her testimony on Sunday in halting ESL that somehow communicated the message of Jesus more eloquently than any preacher I’ve ever heard…

Semsa’s husband knew the men that murdered him for weeks before his death… They had been coming into the church and asking questions about Jesus.  And as a pastor, he had been talking with them, answering their questions and trying to share Jesus’ story to them and his own story of conversion from Islam.

He told his wife that he knew they were false… He used the illustration of Judas’ betrayal… He somehow saw what was coming but felt that the call of God on his life was to keep serving these men and sharing Christ with them…

On April 18, they made another appointment to talk about Jesus…

And they slit his throat.

I also thought about one young lady who was killed in the Columbine shooting, more than a decade ago… The shooters pointed guns at here and told her she would live if she would renounce her faith… she declined… they shot her…

What kind of faith?  What kind of relationship with Jesus makes a person do that?

There might be an answer in the life… or more pointedly in the death of Stephen (Acts 6)…

But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
“Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. (vs 55-58)
It could be that those called to give their lives (REALLY, REALLY GIVE THEIR LIVES) see some of heaven before they actually leave earth…
The bigger question: What am I called to give?  What are you called to give?
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