Tom Thinking Out. Loud.

My youngest daughter, Whitney, was baptized today in the Tuul River in Gachort, about 30-minutes outside of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Click the image for a larger version.

A short blurb in today’s UB Post that has some wondering if religious freedom in Mongolia may encounter problems.

The Mongolian immigration authority is examining religious missionaries in Ulaanbaatar with the help of the Metropolitan Police Department and General Taxation Office in regard of recent complaints lodged against Christian activities.

The authorities said any temple or church that breached Mongolian law will see forced closure. In Ulaanbaatar only, there are around 180 religious churches and temples operating. Around 90 of them are Christian and 60 of them Buddhist, and the rest of shamanistic practice.

I’m going through Joshua in my current seminary studies. I was struck this morning, Father’s Day, by this passage from the commentary, Josha: No Falling Words. Enjoy.

“It’s too bad much of the church has lost this vision of God or Christ as the warrior who fights for his people. Too many of us regard this conception as substandard, by which we mean it does not fit our sentimental twentieth-century graven images of what God ought to be like. The imagery seems too violent. And we do the same thing for the Lord Jesus, with perhaps not a little help from church school materials. The popular image of Jesus is that he not only kind and tender but also soft and prissy, as though Jesus comes to us reeking of hand cream. Such a Jesus can hardly steel a soul that is daily assualted by the enemy…No mild God or soft Jesus can give his people hope. It is only as we know the warrior of Israel who fights for us (and sometimes without us) that we have hopeof triumphing in the muck of life.”

Taken from Joshua: No Falling Words, Dale Ralph Davis, page 82.

I don’t know if I’m going to continue this blog or not. Between my duties at Eagle TV, my seminary studies, and other issues, I’ve not been much in a blogging mood. Maybe it’s time for me to sign off when it comes to this blog.

Of course the creative spark may suddenly hit me again and I’ll want to rant and rave about something. But until that happens I doubt I’ll be here much.

Thanks to everyone who took the effort to spend some time here with me.

My weekly teaching program, Together Through The Bible returns to air in September, but the production on next season’s programs goes on now through the end of summer.

Yesterday I was given the first cut of episode one for the second season. We built a new set and added new localized elements to the program to spruce it up a bit.

During the first season of TTTB the program was often one of our most watched shows on Eagle TV. We’re hoping for a repeat of that when season two goes on the air this fall. Meanwhile, we’ll be posting each program as it’s completed, for Internet viewing before the on air release. Take a peak at episode one, below. Comments welcome.

Together Through The Bible 2×01 from Tom Terry on Vimeo.

Our entire team worked hard to make our election coverage a supreme triumph. Most of the team worked for two days straight without sleep. But I want to acknowledge four people who, as organizers and managers, made everything come together.

In the News Department, Baika and Jarga did an outstanding job, organizing and implementing everything. They planned out every hour of coverage in advance, and worked to make changes on the fly as the situation warranted. Usually when we have major broadcast events like this I am required to step in and manage many of the details of coverage. But not this time! While I hung around the station during the broadcast Baika and Jarga had everything so under control that I was rarely needed. That’s the way it ought to be. Superb job Baika and Jarga!

In Engineering, Chief Engineer Moogi and I.T. Manager Byamba also put in the long hours to keep things up to snuff technically and handle the unforseen technical problems that arose. Without these two there would have been no coverage. I was especially amazed at how Moogi was able to keep her energy up between handling things in house and on the field.

Of course, singling out these four doesn’t diminish the contribution made by all of our journalists, special weekend staff, and college interns who also contributed significantly to our success. Your contributions were immensely valuable! Thanks for making Eagle TV the number one source for election news coverage in Mongolia.

Great job team!

We’re running all day live coverage of Mongolia’s presidential elections. Coverage started at 7am. We’ve currently got 6 live locations via three microwave links and three broadband links. This is, if we’re not mistaken, the most “in community” coverage being run by any station. In fact, only Eagle TV is providing all day coverage. Other stations are only doing cutaways for specific events, then they return to normal programming.

We’ve got nearly 50 people working the election this year and so far the coverage has been received very well. As things stand this is our best election coverage to date. I’m very proud of our team.

Catch some of the coverage yourself through our live Internet feed.

UPDATE: At 6am this morning the Democratic Party declared, based on their preliminary results, that Elbegdorj had won the presidency. They then had a little celebration and march in Sukhbaatar. The catch is that the official results have not been announced yet. Everyone is still waiting on the  General Election Committee to announce the results. So, like good journalists, our people are staying on the clock 24/7 while we wait. Coverage continues and viewership is growing beyond belief.

More than 15,000 people have watched the live Internet stream of the coverage so far, and the number continues to grow. A few other sites have picked up our Internet stream and embeded in on their pages. That’s good for us, thank you very much.

Everyone is hoping that there will not be a repeat of riots from last year. Last year one of the impetuses for the riot was an announcement of “early” and “unofficial” election results to be followed by the official results which were contrary to the first reports. Now we have another “early” claim so we are keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for no repeat of last year.

We’ve also got people in the door filing reports for AP, ABC Australia, and CNN. All are here for access to our video materials to file reports.

Thanks for watching locally and online. Without our audience we’d be nothing. It’s for our audience that we do everything we do.

UPDATE: The MPRP conceded the election to Elbegdorj in a noon time press conference. Eagle TV was the first to break the news. The official numbers from the GEC have not yet been announced.

For nearly three years we’ve wanted to present Eagle TV’s Bible-centered movies in a format that would help our viewers understand the Bible’s interconnectedness and depth. We came up with a concept for creating what amounts to a study Bible on TV.

Other than the daily newspaper, most Mongolians are not big readers. The culture is not necessarily oral, but it comes pretty close. If you live in the city Mongols tend to be well educated and very literate. But as you go farther into the countryside things change. Literacy is still in the 90 percentile range, but the actual practice of reading isn’t that big. The most effective way to share Christ, at least for our ministry, has been to use the storying approach. Our ministry is unique in that we use a series of Bible-centered movies to do the story telling for us.

Now we are moving our set of movies up to the next level. Instead of simply showing the movie on the screen, we are creating a unique visual format that will not only display the movies, but also add unique graphics, scripture references, and historical information to the presentation. In effect we are creating an on-air study Bible loaded with information to help deepen the viewer’s experience with the scriptures.

The only thing that has held us back from producing the programs prior to this time has been manpower and time. I thought of recruiting some of the missionaries locally to help with the project, but that didn’t work out so well. Most are already up to their eyeballs in ministry projects and relationship building. So, being the behind the desk, nose in The Book guy that I am I decided this was just one more project I needed to do myself. I don’t mind it, in fact, I love it. It simply gives me more time to explore the scriptures in depth. I’m already scriptiny my regular teaching program, Together Through The Bible, and spending 90 minutes to three hours nightly on seminary study. How much more Bible can I ingest? I think I’m finding out. My guess is that somewhere between 6-8 hours a day is being spent in Bible study for teaching, scripting, and schooling. But thankfully, since we have a full time station manager keeping watch over the station my time is freed up to do exactly this kind of work.

This afternoon I began the scripting effort on the first movie, The Bible, circa 1962 with John Huston. Yeah, it runs a bit slow at first, but the new visual elements we are introducing will really spruce things up. And to my surprise, I was able to script the first 15-minutes rather quickly, in about two hours. That may seem rather slow, but believe me, this is a complicated chore so two hours is pretty spiffy.

This Sunday Mongolia holds a hotly contested presidential election. While I’ll be on hand at the station from 7am until the election is over, most of my time will be spent scripting Bible 2.0. There’s a lot of ground for me to cover. I need to be able to script eleven movies with about 26 hours of content. A while back my assistant did a calculation figuring out how much time it took me to script an hour’s worth of programming and the number of total hours needed to complete both my TV show and Bible 2.0. When she was done she held up the numbers to me and said, “If you want to finish scripting these programs by the end of summer you’ll need 336 work days to do it” (or some such outrageous number).

Yikes.

Oh well. This is one of those times when you just look at the challenge in front of you, you grit you teeth and say, “Bring it.” Seriously though, if I manage to get this all finished before the end of August  it will truly be a God thing.

“This does not make for good diplomacy, but we are called to witness, not public relations. We must aim to be gracious and winsome in our witness to Christ, but the bottom line is that the gospel will necessarily come into open conflict with its rivals.”

Amen. So say we all. Read the original here.

Here here. See here.

Amen. So say we all.