The Mission Media University of the Visual Story Network is offering a five-week online course in Story in Ministry for mission practitioners, creatives, and leaders of organisations, ministries and churches.
Engaging well with media during the COVID-19 crisis
The many messages around the coronavirus easily confuse us. How do we engage well with media amidst this crisis? As Christians we have a purpose for interacting with people, especially using the media. We engage with media first to listen carefully to the meaning of the messages. Then we think about how the message relates to us. What we learn from the media can shape how we live. Finally, we can speak into the media with a message of value to people. Then we can communicate well to help each other through the coronavirus crisis.
Foundations of Media Strategy online course
Media is widely used in every kind of outreach ministry. The Church has decades of history in using a traditional broadcast approach to media – pushing content out to large audiences. This is not effective in our new media world and we need new strategies. It is no longer enough to push out the story you want to tell using traditional media or even social media channels, and hope that you will connect with an audience.
Why bother with strategies?
Do we need evangelistic and communication strategies? Surely we are just called on to preach the gospel, plain and straight, and leave God to do the rest? ‘Strategies’ may seem to imply worldly marketing methods rather than a dependence on the power of the gospel through the Holy Spirit. There are a number of answers to this very reasonable question:
Gray’s the color of life
Understanding the Gray Matrix ngel promoted a revolution. Not Engels the Marxist thinker, but James Engel the missiologist. He first outlined what has become known as the ‘Engel Scale of Spiritual Decision’. This describes the way in which an individual, or by extension a whole group, progress in their understanding of the gospel, as God’s sovereign grace begins to illuminate …
Possible Media Futures
Rudolf Kabutz, Lausanne Catalyst for Media Engagement, talks about how to think about alternative media futures.