I updated the look of the forerunner.com website a few months ago. There is still a lot of work to be done on the website, but at least the look is no longer ten years out of date!
Since then I have been getting a lot of emails from old friends. I’ve also been making a lot of new contacts. I believe this is a direct result of the changes.
For instance, I just got a shipment of this magazine called: “America, Return to God.” The editor had contacted me a few months ago about reprinting three articles from The Forerunner. I just learned today that according to their website, this magazine “has been published and mailed out to 450,000 leaders of America of all levels (federal, state and local) and all professions (political, educational, business, church, media etc.)”
I was amazed to see how similar the magazine is to the original vision of The Forerunner.
See: http://gcciusa.org/English/ARTG.htm
It’s amazing how God has continues to use what we did many years ago.
In the meantime, I am trying to get back to my original vision for Christian media.
I have a couple of DVD projects in various stages of production. Today, I had a friend come over from Melbourne (I live in Kissimmee, Florida now) and we worked all day and got a tremendous amount done. I figured out the final stages of authoring and burning DVDs — after a lot of learning and problem solving during several days of working with this. (I am not a technical person, so I need a lot of help and encouragement.)
Part of our plan is building the e-commerce aspect of the website. The goal is to raise enough income to pay my friend to take over the maintenance of the website (keeping it fresh and current) and to build an on-line store.
I decided to put full-time Christian media/missions projects on hold for at least a year when I got married five years ago. I have been teaching in a public high school ever since then. We moved twice and bought a house three summers ago. It’s amazing how the time slips away.
Last summer, I went up to visit a friend who has a similar ministry in Nashville. We discussed the idea of me contributing to a few projects. While I continue to be open to that, I decided to concentrate on producing some of my own projects without depending on things to materialize on the other end.
Then I spent the rest of the summer doing creative fund raising and getting all my video production equipment together — and by the time I did that, I was working again. I’ve been slowly working over the past school year get to a place where there are a few projects within sight of being completely finished.
I am excited that I now have the leisure and the inspiration from God to do nothing but produce. I have two months off starting this week and I plan to concentrate on this full-time.
I always thought that being a teacher could be a way of balancing the two ideals. I have my vacation time to dedicate to what I really want to do. It is the first time that I have had this much time to dedicate solely to missions projects while being on solid financial ground.
My hope is to eventually get the income from the website to the same level (or more) of support where I was at before I got married. That would potentially allow me to train a few part-time interns to run a Christian media ministry.
I’ll keep you informed about what happens over the summer.
