By Chris Moon
Good News Productions International has released a new animated video project for kids in hard-to-reach places.
The Amazing Stories series—10 years in the making—features videos depicting 10 Old Testament and 10 New Testament stories. Each video is about five minutes in length.
They will be distributed first in the Indonesian language of Bahasa. Plans are in place to translate the videos into Spanish.
The videos were created with a special eye toward Muslim-majority cultures.
“If it can work in Indonesia, it can work anywhere, culturally,” said Mike Schrage, president of Joplin, Mo.-based GNPI.
BORN ON THE MISSION FIELD
Amazing Stories comes with an interesting backstory, one that spans from east Africa to the United States to Indonesia.
Missionary Shawn Tyler had been working in Kenya and Uganda over at 31-year period. Through a variety of experiences—from planting churches to training leaders to leading an orphan project and dental clinic—he began to realize Christians needed a new way to read Bible stories.
“Generally, we’ve created a rut,” Tyler said. “There’s more to the story than we’re used to seeing.”
People in various cultures tend to notice—and miss—different details in Scripture. For instance, people in the United States tend to miss the true meaning of things like famines because of America’s cultural wealth.
People in other cultures may take note of such details after having firsthand experience with them, said Tyler, who now teaches at Lubbock Christian University.
And so about 10 years ago, Tyler began crafting Bible stories for children, depicting various events from Scripture from an eyewitness perspective.
The idea was to put books into the hands of parents and Sunday school teachers to help children better understand the gospel—while also taking into account details from the stories that connect with their culture.
Tyler said he noticed parents in his mission field didn’t have enough good tools to use to teach Bible stories to their kids. The idea was to print and distribute books that would help.
But when Schrage, a longtime friend, heard about what Tyler was doing, he suggested turning the books into short children’s videos. GNPI distributes Bible-based media around the world.
“Shawn had a really great vision to use a different perspective or a new angle in helping people have a new understanding of these stories that are really famous,” Schrage said.
EASY, BUT HARD
From there, the project began to move forward—very quickly at certain times and very slowly at others.
Connections in the United States helped raise the first $100,000 for the project. All told, GNPI raised more than $350,000 for the project, Schrage said.
Finding a place to produce the videos also was a relatively easy task.
The original idea was to produce videos that could reach a Muslim audience. That meant employing people in a Muslim country to animate them with sensitivities to Muslim culture.
For example, the videos don’t show the faces of Jesus or Abraham, prophetic figures in Islam. The artistic quality also is designed for audiences in the majority world—outside of the United States and Western culture.
GNPI learned about a video production studio in Indonesia, a majority Muslim country, that could produce the videos much less expensively than was possible in the United States. As it turned out, the founder of that studio got his initial inspiration more than 20 years ago from GNPI and its founder, Ziden Nutt.
“There’s probably 10 different serendipitous stories” connected to the project, Schrage said.
And so, the work began . . . and the difficulties.
Schrage said 8 out of the 10 Muslim animators who were working on the project eventually quit as they began to understand what the videos were about—and the intended aim of drawing children and their families to Christ.
“They were going, ‘Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. . . . This is going to be a very convincing project for my children,’” Schrage said. “They just said, ‘I can’t work on this project.’”
He added, “We had to stop several times.”
DONE, FINALLY
But the Amazing Stories project now finally has been completed.
“In one sense, we’re very grateful and excited about the potential,” Schrage said. “Secondarily, there’s a little bit of frustration of why did it take so long? We’ve got to trust that God’s got it, and it will be released at exactly the right time, even though to us it seems delayed.”
Distribution in Indonesia will be through cable television to a wide audience, as well as at the grassroots level through church planters, pastors, and local disciple-making movements.
GNPI isn’t finished with the project, either. Schrage said plans are coming together for other media assets, including interactive e-books, an illustrated study guide with coloring pages, and possibly an interactive app.
The videos will be translated into Spanish and then possibly other languages.
“From there, who knows how many languages?” Schrage said.
Schrage said he’s happy that an idea that began with a missionary in east Africa was able to connect with people in the United States and then move over to Indonesia—and beyond.
Meanwhile, Tyler said he’s happy the videos will be distributed for free.
“My goal is to be able to put some quality materials into the hands of Christians and church leaders around the world . . . without them having to pay any money for it,” Tyler said. “It’s a resource they can use over and over again.”
Chris Moon is a pastor and writer living in Redstone, Colorado.
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