Hello everyone, we have lots of new faces signed up to the blog and quite a bit has been happening in the last two months.

First for some great news: we are now an official 501(c)(3) non-profit organization! The lawyer who helped us with the process said: “This is nothing short of a miracle, both the speed at which this occurred and the relative ease of obtaining it…” We are very happy to be an official non-profit and to have the IRS requirements process behind us. We too were amazed with how quickly we were able to receive non-profit status. Thanks be to God and to all of you who have been praying for us.

Beyond the IRS paperwork, most of our time and energy has been about producing the film and presenting it to potential broadcasters. The finished piece is less than 7-minutes long, but each minute has had hours, and hours, of work behind it.

In March we attended the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville and showed early versions of the movie to potential broadcasters from around the world (everywhere from Australia, the UK, Romania, the Middle East, South Africa, the Netherlands and on and on.) We have quite a bit of interest from broadcasters and are looking forward to wrapping up all the loose ends on the film project and seeing it before audiences.

When will the film be ready, you ask? All the footage is complete, the music is finished and all that remains is finishing up the credits, working on titling and subtitles, audio and color correction, creating the DVD menu, packaging the film, getting DVDs produced and mailed, and putting and the video up on YouTube. Just a few loose ends…more or less…please pray for this process to go smoothly.

Why is this taking so long you may wonder? In the last entry we wrote about the troubles we had with Israeli security disassembling hard drives, losing footage and having to send the drives to data recovery.

After receiving the footage and going through many edits and finalizing the voice-overs, one item remained: securing the rights to some stock footage we utilized. Those of you who have had the chance to see early versions of the film know we have some footage showing the cycle of violence in the region. Using that footage requires purchasing the rights, but before we could do that we needed to research where the footage came from and then negotiate pricing. This alone took several weeks but fortunately, we now have the necessary rights (thanks to a grant we received specifically for the film project).

Once we secured the rights we then shipped the video files from the UK to Iowa (the hard drive arrived in Iowa today!) and now we are waiting to start the final phase of post-production.

The year will accelerate from here in as we gear up for heading to Bethlehem in December. It’s almost unbelievable that 6 months have passed since the team returned from Bethlehem and it’s almost unbelievable that we have just about 7 months to go before returning.

We will soon be publishing the dates for BCP 2008. Be sure to contact us if you’re thinking of joining us this year.

Finally, we have a need for some web development work. If you have the necessary skills and are willing to dedicate 2 hours per night for two-to-three weeks, please drop us a line.

Be blessed and keep us in your prayers…The best is yet to come.