Reflections 2023
As 2023 comes to its end, join us once again as we take a step back, reflect, and celebrate all that God has done for us, with us, and through us this year.
Sharing Stories:
Throughout the year we were able to connect with and support churches, ministers, and nonprofit organizations for 155 total projects. Rather than writing about all 155 of those stories, we’ll just focus on a few.
In April, Campbell University Divinity School alumni from all across the country gathered together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the divinity school. This was a celebration which had been postponed due to Covid, but everyone was grateful to be able to celebrate together this year. We were able to help share this story by recording the worship service and the dinner reception so that they could each be shared with alumni, family, and friends who could not be present in person. We all had a wonderful time celebrating the many years in which the divinity school has helped ministers to better understand and follow God’s call on their lives.
During the summer we were able to connect with a new partner, Church Benefits Board. Church Benefits Board is a ministry of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to provide retirement benefits for ministers and staff members of churches that are affiliated in some way with CBF. We are lucky enough to be able to partner with them for our own retirement plan, and were happy to be able to share the story of who they are and all of the good they do to support their member’s ministries.
For our blog series this year, we decided to focus on reimagining Jesus’ parables—retelling them in a way that a modern audience can hear and re-engage in a way similar to what the original audience may have done. This means recognizing what may have stood out to the original audiences, how the parables have been interpreted, and what questions the parable may be inviting us to ask. The parables we used this year were The Parable of the Leaven, The Parable of the Sower, The Parable of the Lost Sheep, and The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. Those parables were reimagined as The Parable of the Microphone, The Parable of the Cook, The Parable of the Lost Child, and The Parable of the Extras on the Set. We are looking forward to continuing this series into next year as well.
In addition to our normal blogs, we were able to add to our Resonance series, creating two new videos. The focus of these two videos was On Work and On Leisure. It is our hope that these videos will help viewers to begin to build a better and more wholesome theology of work which incorporates rest and play. This led directly into our new series called Sacred Workplaces, which is an attempt to share the stories of people who are doing ministry in their own workplaces—as videographers or bankers or nurses or teachers or any of the other professions we find ourselves in. It is our goal with this new series to inspire people to think of their own places of work as places of ministry—a place in which God has called them to be ministers.
Between our blog, seasonal resources, Resonance, and Sacred Workplaces series, we were able to create 13 new original video resources, freely available for use.
Inspiring Action:
One project that stood out to us as a project which inspired action was a video we created with Neill’s Creek Baptist Church sharing what visitors can expect when visiting. This video walked viewers through the normal flow of a Sunday morning worship service, including where to park, who to speak to for questions or direction, what normally happens in a service, etc. Videos like these invite visitors to take that next step and actually step through the front doors of a church, rather than simply watching online. It is a friendly and engaging way to invite new people to your church, and really communicates a level of hospitality.
Throughout the year many of the projects we did included photography for church websites or welcome videos—videos designed to help communicate the identity of the church to visitors on the website. Both of these types of projects do a lot to inspire action—either the action of visiting the church, engaging in the church community, supporting a ministry, or taking part in some other way. Many people like to see these visuals so they can better understand what they are signing up to do.
One of the annual projects we do is to partner with BWIM NC for their Symposium. This year the theme of the Symposium was play, and participants were encouraged to explore new ways to play, as well as to integrate play into their everyday lives. Through the work we did with this conference we hope to inspire people to both support women in ministry but also to inspire people to learn how to integrate play into their own lives.
Creating Community:
Thank you to everyone who is part of the Parable Media community! This year we were able to connect with and serve 22 churches and denominational organizations, 5 Christian organizations and ministers, and 3 divinity schools. 7 of these amazing partners connected with us this year for the first time! With these organizations we worked on 155 different projects throughout the year, utilizing the talents of our amazing team of videographers, photographers, designers, and AV specialists. We were also able to be present at 4 different conferences, and even led some breakout sessions at one of them.
We also want to say a big thank you to everyone who supported us financially over the course of this year. Donations are hugely important to allow us to continue to grow as a ministry as we serve in the ways God has called us to serve, while also keeping our services available for churches and Christian organizations of all sizes. Your donations have also helped us to keep pace with the growing equipment costs, allowing us to keep our equipment current and relevant. Thank you for your continued support.
2023 has been a great year for our ministry here at Parable Media, and we are excited to see where God leads us next year and beyond.
Thanks be to God.