Media Gratiae Supporter Update

Media Gratiae

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Hi, I'm John Snyder, and I'm the director at Media Gratiae, and this is our first quarterly update.

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We've decided that an occasional update would be a more efficient way of letting our supporters know how your contributions are being used by the

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Lord, rather than just kind of a piecemeal week by week. In these updates, we would like to kind of cover three things.

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We want to give some idea of what God's been doing with the teaching materials that we have here in the past quarter.

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We also would like to let you know what we're working on right now, what's about to be produced, and then what's in the near future.

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We are grateful for the contributions. Without them, we couldn't do what we do. We are a very small team here, and I don't know if you actually have ever heard who all works with Media Gratiae.

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So other than myself, there's my wife, who has come on as the full -time assistant to the director.

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And she really just kind of handles a lot of the organizational stuff behind the scenes to make sure that I do what

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I'm able to do. Also with the team is A .C. Floyd, who's the office manager.

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He handles the accounting, shipping, and customer service. And then there's

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Teddy James. He's our content creator. You may have seen him on a couple of our podcasts. Teddy handles all the filming and the editing of the podcasts.

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Courtney Brewer, who handles our social media presence, marketing, donor relations, and design.

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Courtney kind of wears a lot of hats for us. So while this is a small team, we do look to the

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Lord to give us what we need, to provide materials that we hope, under His blessing, will help

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His people grow in the awareness of His beauty, to be captivated by Christ, to have that life -transforming knowledge of Him.

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With our filmmaker and previous director, Stephen McCaskill, accepting a job with Ligonier Ministries, Media Gratiae will be focusing in the coming days on Bible studies and podcasts rather than on the full -length documentaries.

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Now, I don't mean that we won't be doing Bible studies like Behold Your God again. We are planning a third

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Behold Your God in which we're going to look at the life and labors of Christ. But we will be focusing on smaller studies.

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I want to give a small kind of summary of some of the ways that God has used the materials.

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Recently, I asked A .C. Floyd, our office manager, to give me some facts about the first Behold Your God study and how

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God has been using that. And he gave me a long list. Let me just give you a couple of things. Over the last six years,

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Media Gratiae has shipped the first Behold Your God study to 58 countries. So, other than, of course, the

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United States, Canada, that would include the UK, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Russia, Kenya, Zambia, the

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Philippines, South Africa, and others. I mention South Africa because sometimes we receive an email from people that have gone through the study.

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And that's always particularly encouraging. I mean, we're a small ministry, so 58 countries sounds big to us.

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But when you talk about numbers, the statistics just kind of, to me, they lose their significance.

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But when people write us and let us know how God's been using the study, that really means a lot to us.

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I remember a few years ago receiving a letter from the office of the Attorney General of South Africa.

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It was a letter describing how he had gone through the study, the first Behold Your God study, with his local church.

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So that was quite shocking for me. And then about a week later,

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I received an email from a group of men in South Africa as well. And they were all sitting around a table, pastors and generals in the army, and they were all sitting together smiling.

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About 15 of them holding their workbooks up and taking a picture for us. And it stuck in my mind because it was probably a group of men that would not normally have come together, except for the work of the

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Lord in their hearts. And so that's very encouraging. But most of the communication we get is just from ordinary

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Christians, you know, closer to home. And oftentimes these are what we would say just ordinary

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Christians, but who have gone through the study, and then they have gone through extraordinary sorrows, you know, the loss of a child or a spouse.

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And they've taken time to write us and to tell how being forced to go 12 weeks rethinking

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God biblically or looking at God again to get an ever clearer and higher view of Him, how that was used by the

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Lord to prepare them to pass through such dark times. And that really is very humbling for us.

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Some of my favorite letters are from pastors who perhaps in the latter years of their ministry found the study and went through it and felt that God used it to show them that maybe they had not been on the best track.

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And so they have determined with whatever time they have left to set their heart to know

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God as He is and to reshape the way they approach ministry based on what

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God says about Himself. And I find that particularly encouraging. The study also has gone out to a number of prison systems in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and outside of Philadelphia in particular.

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And I've been able to visit some of the prisons that have done the study. And that also is very encouraging when you find men that are in a very hard context because of their life choices, but now

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God has rescued them or now God has opened their eyes in a way that never opened before.

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And they talk about the joy of living with a living God, the realities of God, even in that circumstance.

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And with the Behold Your God study, it's been translated into Spanish sometime back, but it's also been translated into Russian and Dutch.

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And right now we have a couple of men in Germany working on a German translation. So we're very thankful for that.

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Our normal work week to week, a lot of it is taken up with podcasts. Each week,

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Teddy spends a lot of his time filming and editing podcasts. And the five current podcasts that we produce are

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The Whole Council, Ransom for Many, Hymn Stories, and A Word in Season, and finally,

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From the Heart of Spurgeon. Right now, we are really looking forward to getting the Practical Guide to Family Worship out to you.

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That's an eight -week video -based study with a new workbook included. Now, if you've pre -ordered the workbook, you should have been contacted with some apologies from us for unavoidable delays with manufacturing.

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Of course, these are kind of strange days, and that happens a lot. We expect them before the end of the month, and as soon as they arrive, we'll get them to you.

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Several of you have asked about the Puritan film. Now, this is just the film version of the

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Puritan study as opposed to the entire study. And it will be released, we hope, this fall in two different ways.

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There is the film by itself, and then there's a special collector's edition. And this will contain five hours of interview footage that didn't make it into the original study.

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Anytime you do a documentary like that, you have a lot of material from the interviews that just can't fit in.

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And so if you're interested to hear kind of a fuller response from the men that contributed to that study, to know more fully what they think about the things that they talked about, then this probably would be interesting to you.

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We're also nearing completion on the first of a new series of studies. These are biblical studies that are smaller than the

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Behold Your God studies. They also will include a video lesson and a workbook, but the workbook is much shorter.

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And we're not traveling the world and going to different sites. We don't have interviews at the end.

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So these are meant to be able to be kind of a smaller, more manageable size, six to eight weeks for each study.

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The first to be released will be on the Book of Judges. Now we hope to have three or four of these each year coming out.

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And we will be using some of them that you already know from our Behold Your God studies to write them.

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And finally, we're close to completing the writing on a new Sunday school curriculum, or a children's small group study.

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And this is designed to cover 26 weeks. That's half a year. There are three different age levels that this will be put out in.

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And what it is, we've been working on this for nearly two years now. It's taking the main teachings from the

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Behold Your God studies, number one and two, and bringing them down to a level that children can understand.

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And the new curriculum will be entitled, Behold Your God, Seeking Him Early. Now, with any of the projects like these, it does require a lot of wisdom to know what

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God would have us do. Where should we invest our time? Other people are doing a lot of good things.

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So what does God want us to be working on? And there's a lot of minutiae and it takes a lot of patience. We do ask that you would remember

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Media Gratiae often at the throne of grace. We are thankful for financial contributions.

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We couldn't do what we do without that. But I want to be very clear with you that while financial contributions are helpful, the nearness of God is essential for anything that will have lasting value.

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Amy Carmichael, one of my favorite missionaries, who was a missionary to India at the very end of the 19th and early part of the 20th century, gathered together her co -workers and she made this statement.

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All we really want, all we really need, is God's ungrieved presence with us always.

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That's quite a boast, but I believe it's true. So we ask that you would, as you think of us, please pray that God would make that to be more than a slogan for us here.

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And that we would, as we go about all the small tasks that, you know, fill up our week, that we would know