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.

Every once in a while a new movement comes along that seeks to capture the attention of people away from traditional faith commitments. My attention was grabbed by one so-called spiritual movement last week. Calling itself the “Spiritual But Not Religious” movement (SBNR), it portends to offer true spirituality instead of that stuffy, old time religion. What does SBNR offer?

According to the movement’s website, SBNR folk are those who avoid, “Guilt—A set of rules to follow.” SBNR people are those who “walk beyond all religious forms that bind our humanity.” Additionally, the movement claims that “There is no longer such a strong need for a minister, church or sacred texts to put boundaries on an experience of wonder.” Or to put it more succinctly, “Spirituality is more concerned with experience than dogma.”

The movement is founded by a supposedly Christian pastor of the innocuously named church, “Christ Community Church.” The name seems to ring with “Christianity,” but the movement’s principles clearly defy the definitions in scripture of what is spiritual and what is not.

For instance, take the quotes just offered in the paragraphs above, such as avoiding, “A set of rules to follow.” It sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? Not to the ears of the Apostle Paul who said of those rules to follow, “For we know that the Law is spiritual” (Romans 7:14 emphasis mine).

If the Law is spiritual then why do men create movements that seem to repudiate God’s word? The same scripture provides the answer: “I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Romans 7:14).

It is the nature of all so-called spiritual movements to redefine what spirituality is. Last week I asked on my blog site, “What is spirituality?” Not too many takers on that one. It seems that in our post-modern world true definitions are difficult to come by.

Unless we go to the Bible.

We’ve already seen one definition from Paul—the word of God is spiritual. If you want to be a spiritual person then you must go to the word of God to assist you in that endeavor. But movements like SBNR deny this fundamental truth. They not only deny it, they turn the definition of “spiritual” into some kind of feel-good-only sense of wonder and mysticism. Amongst its many examples, here’s how SBNR defines spirituality.

•    A rainbow emerging through violent storm clouds,
•    A newborn baby cradled in your arms,
•    A brilliant sunset illuminating mountains

Are these “spiritual?” They look an awful lot like “natural” to me. Therein lies part of the problem. SBNR and movements like it redefine spiritual so that it is really nothing more than a personal, subjective, emotional experience—regardless of religious profession. In fact, SBNR seems to embrace the feel-goods of every religion. SBNR claims that true spirituality includes the “universal wisdom” of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, nature traditions and more. In fact, SBNR is nothing more than Buddhism disguised. According to the movement’s website: “There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a path to our liberation. If we follow this path to its conclusion, the result is a rebirth or enlightenment, a direct experience of spirit within and without, a supreme liberation, which marks the end of sin and suffering.”

That’s not spirituality. That’s Buddhism.

So what is true spirituality? As already mentioned, we cannot have true spirituality without the Bible. “For we know that the Law is spiritual” (Romans 7:14). The Apostle Paul—a true spiritual man—defined for us what a spiritual person is. Notice how closely Paul ties the spiritual man with the wisdom of God’s word instead of human systems.

“We have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” (I Corinthians 2:12-13).

What do those spiritual words say to us? “Who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ” (I Corinthians 2:16).

Did you catch that? We have the mind of Christ. We have, through the Holy Spirit—who is the origin of all true spirituality—the ability to know what God thinks. What does God think? He thinks this:

“No man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ…Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, “He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness” and again, “The Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are useless” (I Corinthians 3:11,18-20).

A truly spiritual person recognizes Christ for who he is, submits to the authority of Christ and his word, and orders his life according the the principles of Christ.

“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).

Without these things our so-called spiritual experiences may offer emotional satisfaction, but they cannot progress beyond that. Man’s own mind may deceive him into believing his is spiritual when in fact he is only acting according to the sin nature which thrusts itself against submission to Christ and his word.