National Religious Broadcasters Conference 2008
What a snore? No, just kidding. Actually it was very inspiring. The first session I attended had Phil Vischer the creator of Veggie Tales speaking. Did you know a good friend loaned him $60,000 to produce the first show? Most of the companies he approached to under-right the children’s series with talking vegetables laughed at him. Boy, did they miss out. As of last count, more than 50,000,000 copies of Veggie Tales have been sold all over the world.
As many of you know, the company that produced Veggie Tales, Big Idea, went bankrupt. Wow! Was that a devastating blow? Yet, through the experience the Lord got a hold of Phil’s heart and challenged him to put God first. Jesus actually allowed Big Idea to be brought down just to make sure Phil’s heart was in the right place. Now, don’t go writing me letters. There’s always more to the story than that, but over the course of the evening the one point that he challenged us with is to focus our energies on what God wants and not on the “impact” of our ministry. Our greatest contribution to the Kingdom will come out of our relationship and focus on Jesus.
You can learn more about Phil here - Phil Vischer
Needles to write, there was a lot more that happened at this years NRB. Let me leave you with this. There is a changing of the gaurd from the older generation of static talking head TV evangelist to motion picture online reality based programming. Story will win out in the coming years. We as followers of Jesus must hone our craft at telling great story about the human experience. This is where we will speak into our culture and captivate the hearts of those around us. We need to be provocative and spur dialogue. Get them to ask the questions, so when they ask us for the answers they’ll actually listen. Did you know that Jesus used parables to weed out the ones who weren’t ready for the message? Have you ever noticed how many times the disciples had to ask him what he meant? Why is that? Read it for yourself. I’ll post on this topic at another time.
I’ll end with this quote from Phil. “Be attached to God’s mission.”