Reflections 2024
In what has become a yearly tradition for us, it is once again time to look back on the year we have had. We take this time to remember the stories God has allowed us to share. We take this time to reflect upon the ways God has worked through us to inspire many different communities. We take this time to celebrate the many ways in which we were able to help build Christian community. Above all, we are grateful for the many different ways God has worked for us, with us, and through us this year.
Sharing Stories.
Throughout 2024 we were trusted to share the stories of many different churches, ministers, and Christian nonprofit organizations. This resulted in us working on 167 different projects throughout the year, which is quite a lot of different stories to share. Rather than trying to write about all of them, we have settled on a few to share here and a few different ones to share in our annual report for 2024.
One such story happened towards the end of the year. A church located in Arlington, Texas called Tabernacle Baptist Church reached out to us in regards to three different videos they wanted to produce. As many of you are aware, Arlington, Texas is quite a long way from Raleigh, North Carolina. Naturally, our first question was how did they hear about us? The answer surprised me—even all the way down in Texas, the work we do is so unique that we were really the only option to pop up for what they were searching for. We were able to work out the details and ended up spending a weekend down there connecting with them and working on the three video projects. The end result for them was three videos that will help them to share the Gospel with the community around them, and to help them share the story of their church.
This past year we were also able to work on some projects for the Pan African Koinonia, a ministry of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. The purpose of Pan African Koinonia is to cultivate an increased presence of Black individuals and churches throughout CBF life. In alignment with this purpose, we recorded several videos for them to share a powerful speaker, important conversations, and highlight the importance of CBF connection to Black churches. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to play a small part in what this ministry is doing.
With the massive increase in work we experienced this year in comparison to previous years, we fell a little behind on creating the original content we had planned to create this year. Despite this, we were still able to produce three new videos to close out the Modern Parables series (at least for the time being). These videos were reimagined parables based on the parable of the barren fig tree, the treasure in the field, and the friend at night. In addition to these videos we also began work on two new Resonance videos. These videos were put on hold, but we are planning to finish them in 2025. The focuses of these videos are on food, and on art.
In the second half of this year we were able to connect with the Rust Family Foundation over a shared interest in promoting workplace ministry. In addition to helping them enhance their own ministry with a new website we are working on, we also will be partnering with them to create five new videos as a continuation of our own Sacred Workplaces series. These new videos will help share the stories of five new people who can speak to their own workplace ministries.
Inspiring Action.
Several times over the course of the year we connected with a nonprofit located in Durham called Durham Cares. Durham Cares is a multifaceted ministry that strives to foster collaboration, develop leaders, and educate the people of Durham to care for their neighbors in holistic ways. They work to inspire people in their community to do good work within the community—to build each other up and to stand up for their neighbors. One of our favorite projects we did with them was to create a highlight video promoting their annual Bull City Madness tournament. This is a basketball tournament held to celebrate Durham's rich basketball history, bring the community together, and raise awareness and support for organizations doing good work in Durham.
We were also able to share the story of another basketball related ministry—Upward ministry hosted at Trinity Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC. This ministry is designed to bring parents and children together in a low pressure church setting, to foster community through basketball and cheerleading. Ministries like this one allow many people who would never normally go to church to be exposed to the Gospel on a weekly basis. It teaches the children who participate how to be leaders and how to be a part of a team. We were able to share the story of this ministry, hopefully to inspire more people to participate.
This year many of us in North Carolina were affected in some way by Hurricane Helene as it tore through multiple states including the western part of North Carolina. We were blessed to see firsthand how many different churches in our expanded community responded to support the many people caught in the path of this storm. In mid December we had the special opportunity to travel to western North Carolina to record the stories of how several different CBFNC churches facilitated relief efforts. These amazing communities of people helped by sharing food and water, providing a place to shower, and sending out other needed items just to name a few. We are excited to work with CBFNC in the early part of 2025 to share the stories these pastors told on behalf of their communities.
Creating Community.
As always, we want to make sure to extend a huge thank you to everyone who is a part of the Parable Media community—it is through you that we are able to follow the path God has called us to walk. This year we were able to serve 33 churches and denominational organizations, 12 Christian organizations and ministers, and 2 different Divinity Schools. 28 of these amazing communities connected with us for the very first time this year! Not only that, but several of these organizations connected with us from outside of North Carolina, including trips to Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Serving 47 different organizations for 167 total projects takes a lot of work, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without our amazing network of videographers, photographers, designers, and AV specialists. In fact, we were able to bring on three new part time team members! Chris West joined us in January as our Minister of Development and Strategic Growth, John Kimbrough joined us in November as our Minister of Digital Production, and Christy Whalen joined us in November as well as our Financial assistant. We believe that our expanded team and amazing network of contractors will allow us to continue to meet the needs of our ever-growing community.
We also want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who supported us financially over the course of this year. Our mission is to provide every ministry the option of affordable, high quality digital media services, and we are able to do that in large part thanks to the donations we receive. Those donations allow us to cover things like equipment costs and most travel expenses ourselves so the ministries we work with don’t see those as added costs on their bill. It also allows us to keep our costs low enough to work with many organizations that otherwise wouldn’t really have any other good options. Your donations make a huge impact on many different ministries and communities, so thank you for your continued support.
2024 has been an amazing year full of growth and new connections, and we are excited to see the ways in which God works for us, with us, and through us next year and beyond.
Thanks be to God.