Putting the ‘media’ into Matthias Media

I've always loved movies about the movie-making business. (My favourite is The Player starring Tim Robbins.) I particularly like those scenes where the young, green scriptwriter is pitching his movie idea to the fat cat producer: “It's Pretty Woman meets King Kong; it's Thelma and Louise meets Blazing Saddles”. And the movie mogul just sits there, puffing on his cigar, and asking, “Yes, but does it have a sex scene?”

Being one of the few Christian publishers in our part of the world, we get a lot of ‘pitches’. Big double-spaced manuscripts arrive in the mail (or worse, in the email), people bail me up at conferences to sell their idea, and I go through the cigars like you wouldn't believe.

A bit over five years ago, a young Moore College student pitched us his idea for a CD-ROM version of Two Ways to Live. The concept was to use audio, video and multi-media elements to communicate the gospel to people who prefer to interact with a screen than read a book or tract.

It sounded interesting, and we said, “Sure. Go away and do some work on it, and then talk to us some more.” To be honest, I didn't expect to hear from the guy again, because we normally don't. People come up with great ideas, and get enthusiastic about them, but it's the rare individual who has the skill, discipline and perseverance to turn the good idea into a finished product.

In this case, we did hear from him again. The keen young student, whose name was Simon Roberts, came back to us with a very impressive prototype, and we were sold. Not long after, Simon finished the Two Ways to Live CD-ROM in his spare time, and not long after that, we offered him a job at Matthias Media as our ‘multi-media editor’.

Since then, Simon has been almost single-handedly responsible for putting the ‘media’ into ‘Matthias Media’. From the original Two Ways to Live CD-ROM (now in its second edition), he spun off a very popular, useful, video-based apologetics course called So Many Questions (also now in a completely revised edition). He took our steam-driven audio department and dragged it into the 20th century, so that we now have a wide range of very useful sermon audio packages on CD and MP3. He drove the production of one our lesser known but most-loved resources (by its devotees): The Briefing CD-ROM, which contains every article published over the last 20 years and which is thus a goldmine of useful material for research and ministry training. And he designed and produced the innovative and interactive Bible study resource Genuine Imitation.

But perhaps Simon's most impressive achievement has been to pioneer our range of video-based Bible studies and training courses. Only yesterday (as I write this), I was ‘on set’ with Simon and the team of video professionals he had assembled to shoot footage for our latest training course: Six Steps to Reading Your Bible.

The ‘Six Steps’ courses (to Encouragement and to Talking about Jesus) have been a raging success in the past three years in training Christians in some of the basics of Christian life and ministry. They manage to blend Bible study, discussion and small group exercises with video-based instruction, examples and role-plays-resulting in small group-based training that is fresh, is easy to run and just works.

None of it would have happened without Simon's intelligence, resourcefulness and perseverance in assembling everything that was needed and managing all the complexities of video production through to completion.

I mention all this because, in Australia, we don't thank people or acknowledge them until they are dead or departing. You'll be glad to know that Simon is not dead. But he is departing. As of July this year, Simon will take up a full-time pastoral position with his local church. We're not surprised that Simon has made this move; his heart is for the gospel and for ministry, and this new opportunity for him to minister at the ‘coalface’ is something he's been wanting to do for a while. Indeed, it's why he was such a great editor for us. For Simon, it was never about the technology or the ‘gee whiz’-ery of multimedia; it was all about getting the word of God out.

We will miss him enormously.