Invest & Invite

A few weeks ago... Dwight shared a message about investing in people and then inviting them to church... and then ultimately to a relationship with Jesus Christ. He stressed how important relationships are to a true follower of Christ. It is our responsibility to build into the lives of others and encourage them in their spiritual journey. Well... one of the creative elements that we used that day... was a piece that I helped to produce. At the time, we didn't have any of our video editors available... so we had to come up with a different way to tell the story. How would we tell the story without video??? (flannelgraph was not an option)

Well... do you remember those old stacked Ektagraphic carousel slide projectors that were so popular for multi-media presentations back before PowerPoint came along? Well... that was the effect that I was going for. The idea was to layer a series of still photographs being projected in a way that it appeared that the subjects were moving (like video). Well... I asked Denny Trimmer (from Solid Rock Photography) to come along and help shoot the stories. It was very "experimental".... but it actually turned out to be a nice piece. The important thing was... that we were able to tell real life stories (which are always better than any other creative element that we could possibly come up with) with excellence (Doing the best we could with what we had). And because we use video so often at NewPointe... it was also a very unique and fresh way to tell the stories.

I was the first person in the piece to tell my Invest & Invite story. My story is about a Youth Pastor who invested in me when I was a high school student in Nashville, TN. His name is Randy Dodd. He is now the Senior Pastor at a Chicago Heights Church of the Nazarene. Randy is basically responsible for pushing me out of my comfort zone... and into using my music for God. He also taught me about pursuing life and God with passion. Well... you can watch the video to hear the rest of the story. Check it out: