Joel C. Rosenberg On Biblical Education & Communications Priority Investment
Biblical education becomes a central focus of The Joshua Fund’s investment priorities.
Biblical education becomes a central focus of The Joshua Fund’s investment priorities. Through biblical teaching and highlighting other education resources, The Joshua Fund has seen soaring growth in biblical education consumption through various media outlets.
Transcript:
- [Woman] I want to thank you for all Arab news and all Israel news. It's quite a voice that we haven't had. And I was hearing that you went from 6,000 views a year on social media to over 6 million. So how has that grown? What is happening? And how is your voice being heard? And how is the Lord using that?
- Thank you. Well, in that particular case, you, you crossed two wires, but they're both good wires. And so, So... So two things the Joshua Fund, you know, build-out in areas of, we euphemistically call "special projects," that's a pastor encouragement, pastor training, evangelism, discipleship, classic ministry, to strengthen the local, national church. That's a big part of what we do. Then there are the neighbors doing the same thing, but in the Arab world, there's humanitarian relief, hm, there's operations, and there's education and communications. It's only in the last few years that we've really begun to build out and finance that education and communications thing cause even over the course of 15 years, building everything else out was super hard. You know, we're operating... look if it were easy to reach Israel with the gospel of Jesus Christ, it would have been done by now. Right? It's 2000 years. So it's challenging, and the Muslim world is challenging too, but we're really glad to have a new education and communications director that came on several years ago. He's here, Chris Free. Where's Chris? I want to give a shout-out to Chris he's in the mass. He is really... he's come from CBN. He, he understands both video and digital ministry. He's really helped the Joshua Fund, um take a lot of the archive material of our conferences and sermons I've given all kinds of and say, "How do we cut that up in small pieces that are digestible and begin to drive that out into YouTube and then draw people to the larger versions. And we are seeing just soaring interest, Ah, You know, he's basically taking the dead sea scrolls, and you know, dusted them off and, and we see a response. We never even tried it. We never even thought about it. And that's when you have good people on your team. They think differently when gifted in different ways than we are; good things happen by God's grace. So that's that. Now we realized that there was still another component that the Joshua fund wasn't doing. That is the tremendous media bias against Israel, against Muslims against peace, against followers of Jesus in the region. And it was infuriating. And so you either gonna, you know, blow a burst a big blood vessel, or you got, or you got to do something about it. And so I set up a parallel nonprofit called "Near East Media," and we set up these two websites, "All Israel news," "All Arab news." If you're not on one of it, if you're not one of our free email subscribers, I would encourage you to do that because when you try to educate people about what's going on in the region, a book is really helpful because it gives you the big picture. It allows me to take you into, in this case, the palaces and the oval office and let you see what's going on. You see the dynamic, and I can paint portraits of the very leaders making the decisions that affect our lives and the lives of our friends and allies on the ground and our enemies. Um, but the story is fast-moving, you know, so that a book can frame it, but it's... it's, but then there are day-to-day events, and people are curious what you have. Yeah, but what about this today? That's not in your book that things are moving. So what's happening? Why does it matter? How do we pray about it? That's why we felt this is; this is needed. And it's, I can't tell you something as much as it has been exciting to set up the Joshua Fund; it's been super exciting also to set up this. Now the Joshua Fund is an investor in Near East Media, these two websites, because we share, we realize it's an educational component of helping people understand what's happening today. We also have big picture pieces, but um, we feel like we can't, you can't just do one or the other, by the way, the book... Traditionally, Joshua Fund is not; I've not promoted my books through the Joshua Fund because they're a commercial venture. So ethically, we don't, you don't want to cross those wires, but Len and I decided that we would gift the copyright for this book because of its uniqueness and the timing to the new nonprofit, Near East Media. Since we're partners, anyway, we thought that allows us to drive this to the very audience that cares the most. Right? The audience of the news sites, but also the Joshua Fund Community. You all have been faithfully praying for us, encouraging us, funding us, and we've never had a dinner like this at ever; we've never had a weekend like this. And we thought, well, maybe it's time after 15 years maybe we should put, pull the curtain up a little bit and invite you all in to learn a little bit more, hopefully, a lot more about what we do. We weren't trying to hide anything, well we were, Okay. We weren't; we were trying to; it's very sensitive what we do. So it's, you can't just, you know, Hezekiah learned the hard way, you can't just let people come in, and you know, you're not, you're not the enemies, you're the allies, but you can inadvertently walk people and say, "Yeah, here's my armory, here's the treasury." Yeah, That didn't go so well for poor Hezekiah. So that's why we're working together side-by-side and in partnership. And I thank you for asking; I'm glad it's been encouraging and just one other thing, why all Israel news, and, but why and all Arab news? Because some of our Arab Christian friends, my contacts and sources in the Arab and Muslim world, most of them are just not ready to be interviewed, quoted, profiled um, at an Israeli website. So, we've got both they're interlinked, and we've had some of the most influential Arab Muslims in the world. Not only be quoted and interviewed, but they're on our advisory board.
