Our priority at IMM is to put Jesus on every screen. Working with like-minded partners on production and distribution efforts enhances stewardship and maximizes impact. Because we value collaboration, we seek to create high production value visual content that can be readily produced in new languages.
The Bible Stories Video Project (BSVP) is a great example of this concept. Filmed over several years, BSVP is a collection of 30 video stories about the life and ministry of Jesus. They feature dramatized visual accounts of people he met and interacted with, parables he told and highlights of his ministry path. Each video, like the Lost Son, provides viewers with valuable historic, cultural and spiritual insights. A flexible production design allows partners to use a new native speaker host to introduce and conclude the stories and to narrate over the full-screen visuals and original music.
Over the years, missionaries, national churches, broadcasters and numerous outreach ministries have produced BSVP video stories in scores of languages. Potential audiences for these total many millions of people. Recent versions of the Parables in Albanian, Berber, Bulgarian, Croatian, Dari, Kurdish, Pashto, Russian and Serbian have been introduced or begun. And we’re excited to announce our newest partnership to produce these stories in the Vietnamese language!
REAP (Roever Educational Assistance Programs) plans to produce all 30 video stories and the four, thirty-minute programs of our Open the Gospels series in Vietnamese. REAP offers extensive resources for ministerial training and leadership development in Vietnam and among the Vietnamese diaspora worldwide. The new language version will be used to enhance those efforts and provide additional outreach tools for their ministry. Vietnam is one of six officially communist countries in the world with nearly 95 million people living there and almost 5 million global emigrants outside the nation. We rejoice that Jesus will be seen on the screens of thousands of Vietnamese in 2017!