Category Archives: Ministry Update

Ministry Update :: July 11, 2012

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Our family is enjoying the warmer weather that summer is finally bringing. Lots of projects around the house are getting done, the kids are wearing holes in the lawn under the swings through much use, and the garden is growing. The kids are done school for the summer with Adelaine having graduated from kindergarten, and Naomi has finished her first year of homeschool teaching with Ellie! It was a lot of work for Naomi, and they are both excited for the summer break.

Meanwhile, at the office, I have some help in the video department! Ken has joined our GoodSeed team and is serving as an intern as a Video Production Assistant. He is helping move a couple old projects ahead, and will be freeing me up to work more on the “By this Name – Interactive Edition“.

Recently, Naomi and I were given a trip to Phoenix, Arizona to do real estate photography for some friends. We had a really good time together, and we saw this as a trip away to celebrate our tenth anniversary(!). Our actual anniversary was just a few days after I had returned from India, and I unfortunately spent most of that day on the couch with a fever.

While on our trip to Arizona we took a day to see some sights, including a big hole (the 1,200 m, 4000 ft Meteor Crater near Flagstaff), and a big ditch (a.k.a. the Grand Canyon). Thank you very much for the trip (you know who you are) and to Grandma and Papa for babysitting the kids!

Meteor Crater:

Grand Canyon:

Don’t drop the camera! Hanging the camera out over the precipice while watching the sunset at the Grand Canyon.

God bless,

Troy & Naomi

Ministry Update :: December 11, 2012

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Video production continues on the Interactive Edition of “By This Name”. We have been keeping a busy shooting schedule but our crew is doing a great job.

My view of things

Steve capturing audio with the new boom mic.

Allan working the teleprompter.

Please pray for our video crew and the production. A complex project like this will have many challenges, but one of our biggest is noise from outside our office. We are very thankful for our studio, but we are located in what must be the noisiest part of town. Near us we have:

  • a trucking company,
  • a seed cleaning plant,
  • a concrete plant,
  • an autobody shop where they do sandblasting outside,
  • trucks filling up with water just outside the studio,
  • and then there are the train tracks just a few dozen meters away…

All these sources of noise cause many retakes and force us to take frequent breaks, but, despite this, we are still making good progress and our staff are encouraged with what we are getting filmed.
Here is a preview of one of the sections from the book. This video deals with explaining eternity, and how God has always been and always will be. He is without beginning or end. Eternity is, of course, difficult to understand and express to others, so we use some visual aids to help. This is from Chapter 2, Section 2 from “By This Name.”

 

I enjoyed working on this particular segment because it combines my interests in astronomy with teaching others about God. This one will probably end up being the most complicated one to edit as it involved many different video segments that I had to create with some free astronomy software (Celestia).

I hope to post more segments as I get opportunity to edit them together.

Ministry Update :: December 16, 2011

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As the year comes to a close, we wanted to share with you a few stories we’ve heard over the past year. We hope your hearts will be encouraged as ours have been as we hear of those who are coming to a clear understanding of God’s Word for themselves.

The first couple stories we want to share with you take place overseas:

Belarus, using our children’s book, “The Lamb“:

“I am back from Belarus. “The Lamb” was amazing!!! We used it with about 100 Russian-speaking Belarusians ages 5-18 and they loved it!! God was so amazing during our trip and so many children finally understand what Jesus did for them and received the gift of salvation that God intends for His children.”

Thailand, using “By This Name“:

“Hi, I am currently working [with] a ministry to women in prostitution… a friend of mine referred me to “By This Name.” It is perfect for what I need–concise, clear, simple, and fitted for this culture–exactly what I want… except that it’s in English! I have two 19-year-old girls right now who have been requesting a Bible study… It’s a WIDE open opportunity and I want to make use of it… but the time also seems so short. So I thought I’d be audacious enough to ask you if there’s ANY way possible that I could have the completed chapters of the book so I could at least begin studying with them?”

[Happily, we were able to send her a full-draft edition of the Thai “By This Name.”]

Germany, using “The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus“:

“A young man from Germany was given a German copy of “The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus.” The book had such an impact on his life, he went home to Germany and invited some unsaved friends over for a weekly study. Twelve are now believers!”

Ministry Update :: November 29, 2011

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Being equipped with the right tools is very important to us here at GoodSeed. After all, we are making evangelism and discipleship tools to equip people to reach others for Christ. We do our best to make these tools high quality, be it the quality of the paper or binding of a book or the production value of a video. We do this so that they will last and not be rejected out-of-hand as cheap junk by someone investigating Christianity. I have personally seen a number of videos that have good content, but you have to be really interested to bear watching it because it is so poorly done.

A couple weeks ago we started video production for the By This Name interactive book. The first day was really just testing our ideas and equipment.

We did a morning of filming and then I started to edit it together to see how it was working. After reviewing it, we decided to purchase a shotgun mic just to test and determine if it provided better sound than our (really good) Lavalier mic. It is a big investment, but if we didn’t like the new mic we could always send it back. Here are the results of our testing:

After doing these comparison tests we decided to go with the shotgun mic as it seems to provide clearer audio. This will mean more work for us as one of our crew members must now become a boom mic operator (Steve’s arms will be tired!), but we think it will give us clearer audio for the rest of of the project.

Now that we are equipped with the right tools, we are diving back into our production schedule and are going to be doing more shooting this week. Please pray for our crew as we set aside our regular jobs and pick up cameras, slates, mics and other equipment.