 Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to BC 314, our course on media and technology and ministry. Good to see all of you. It takes half a year. We haven't met for a long time. Anita, Tafina, Debbie, Aradhana, Rosalynn, Zalitoli, Debbie. Well, thank you all for joining the class. And I think the others also should be joining us. I just changed, I had to change the the classroom link. So maybe some students haven't joined us. Let me post a message. Let's let the students know that the link to, yeah, so I just had to update the link to the global classroom. So I'm not changed. All right. Yep. So others are joining in. Good morning, everyone. Joan and Vega. Good to see all of you in the class. Great. Let's pray. Let's get started. The others will join us shortly. We will get going. So could somebody please take a moment to pray with a class and then we'll start. That's great. Dear Heavenly Father, we come to you under the name of Jesus. We thank you for this day. We thank you for the new semester that we're about to start, Jesus. God, we thank you for the course. We thank you for Pastor Ashish who's gonna teach us. But I just pray that Holy Spirit will be with us throughout the session as the pastor teaches us, help us to open our mind and heart and listen to what I understand it and accept it and be fully convinced in the truth. And God, whatever we have learned, whatever we are going to learn, Jesus help it to apply it in our life so that we can be a blessing to the generation and to the generation that is about to come. We thank you for Pastor Ashish and I bless all the classmates over here and help us to have a good life by commission throughout the session so that we can equip us for the greater purpose and the calling that you have placed in our life. We give you all the glory and honor in Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you. All right. So welcome to once again. Welcome to BC 314. Just a few minutes back I posted the PDF for our first lecture. So as we keep going through the course, I'll keep giving you the lecture notes, PDF, and you can just take it from the Classwork section and stay updated with the content that we're going to cover. So let's first introduce the course and what we're going to do, what our objectives are, and so on. Media and technology in ministry. And I'm really excited about this area, media and technology, because, you know, I would say in one way that we're actually privileged to be living in a day and hour like this, where we can actually have these tools of media and technology to serve people, right? If you go back in time, you know, a couple of centuries ago, maybe or even in the last century, if you wanted to reach people, you had to physically travel. And those days, people had to travel either by road or by ship. So you just imagine in those days, if you wanted to go and share the gospel with somebody, you know, just in a different part, in a different state, you had to physically travel. There's no other way. You have to go then, you know, so much of time, so much of energy, so much of effort to go. And then slowly time evolved. And the media and technology tools came, tools emerged, where today, literally, you can be in one part of the world. And you can serve people in so many different parts of the world. And it really is not, it makes, makes things so much more easier, right? You can be in many places at the same time, through using these tools of media and technology. You can serve people, according to their convenience, it doesn't cost us so much money, you don't have to buy a plane ticket and keep traveling place to place. So many things can happen. And so this, it's just an exciting time. And this whole, if we just learn how to make use of these tools, it enables us to serve so many more people in a much, much easier way. So really excited about this, this area, and also feel so privileged that we can make use of these, these tools to reach so many people so quickly all over the world. So this is not a technical course. That means we're not going to teach you how to use cameras or teach you how to, you know, build things and software. So there's absolutely no need, you know, to be a technical person to do this course. We will be touching on certain technologies. I'll be mentioning things to you. The idea is to inform, to keep us informed of what is available there. And some thoughts that you would need in making decisions and making choices. When it comes to media technology, of course, there will be people who are helping you in the ministry, who will be experts on this, they will know, you know, the media, they will know the technical part, they will know all of that. But when you are having conversations with them, when you have to make decisions, when you have to make certain choices, when you have to think about strategies, then of course, it's important that you know yourself, you know, what is that? How do I make the right choice? What is the criteria? So it's good for us, whether you're a pastor or whether you're whatever kind of ministry you're doing, it's good to know these things so that you can engage meaningfully with the people who are on your team, whom you're going to work with and help make the right choices and right decisions. So this course is coming from that perspective more to inform us on all the opportunities that are there and how we can make use of them. And what are some things to be careful about when you're using these things? Because you don't want to do something wrong and then, you know, unnecessarily cause trouble for the church or ministry that you are serving. So some of the things that we will cover today, we will just begin by looking at the trends and, you know, and understanding the generations that we are serving. We look at some data online. Of course, all of these things keep changing almost, almost from month to month. So we'll just look at data online and try to understand where things are. We'll talk a little bit about contemporary methods. So we will, we'll say, okay, you know, these are all the options, things that are there. And what are the guidelines we should use when we are working with different methods in ministry? Let me talk about how things have changed in various areas in the ministry of the word, you know, how things have changed and how today people are ministering the word of God. Talk about changes that have taken place in the gathering, in the venue where people gather together. You know, if you come to APC, it doesn't look like this old church building. It's very different. You know, what people generally used to go to and in some places they still go to, you know, a cathedral and an altar and all those things. Here you come and you come to a modern, you know, a modern gathering place. They have LEDs and lights and this that looks very different. But people are still worshiping God, they're learning about the word of God. We talk about how worship has changed the introduction and the use of creative arts, print media, which is still a very useful tool. I will talk a little bit about radio and television. Some of the entity and then some other, you know, current media, which is entertainment, movies, gaming. So when you talk about entertainment, we include performing arts over there. Then we kind of move into more of a, some of the digital side of things. I will talk about digital communications, some guidelines, you know, when we communicate digitally, you know, through email, social media, those things. What are some guidelines you do? You need to keep in mind. We'll also talk about some guidelines for graphics and videos. We'll talk about the use of social media. We'll then cover digital equipment, you're right, from cameras on to audio equipment, to live streaming equipment, those kinds of things. Then we talk about software platforms that we can use and we'll close up, I guess, talking about an important part of protecting people's data and confidentiality and privacy. A lot of what we'll be sharing, especially in the second part of what we're doing in digital communications, is basically what we are using at APC. I'll be just sharing with you, you know, this is what we're doing at APC and this is how we are going about things. So it's coming from a practical, this is how we're doing things and sharing with you and also point you maybe to some other churches or ministries that kind of are on the cutting edge of how they're using these media and technology and the tools that are there and point you to those kinds of things. So this is generally how we are going to go, what we're going to cover in this course. I hope you'll find it useful. As always, there'll be one simple assessment at the end and it's a non-technical assessment, so you don't have to memorize or learn any technical things. Just cover that, okay, you understood the course, you understood the ideas that we have shared, how to make decisions, etc. So that would be the assessment. So you don't have to worry about learning technology and so on. Okay, so let's get started. We want to talk about the trends that are there and just understanding generation. So I'll just introduce this and then we will take time, feel free to ask questions anytime like how we always do. So when we talk about media, we're really talking about the various means of communicating en masse, that means to large numbers of people. So we're talking about different forms of communication, whether you're doing broadcasting, publishing, online, internet, and they can take on different formats, whether you're doing print media or you're doing television, movies, games, music or using mobile phones, all kinds of things. So basically, we're talking about means to reach the masses, that's what we're referring to when we say media. Technology of course, we are using that to talk about the skills, the equipment that we use, the software and the hardware that we use in order to do what we want to serve people or to manage data or to communicate and so on. So media and technology, technology referring to the software and the hardware, the equipment, the things that we use to serve the people. Now, it's very interesting to look at some information online. Let me see, am I sharing it? Oh, I'm so sorry. I did not start sharing my screen. Oh, I'm really sorry. Let me share my screen. Okay, I'm so sorry. I should have started by sharing my screen. All right, so here's the course notes. I was looking at my course notes and I forgot that I was not sharing. So this was kind of just the introduction I gave. And these are the things we're going to be covering in this course, the trends and methods and so on, and the grading maps and so on. So in the PDF here, we just explained what media technology. So let's look at some online data and I just give the link here because some of these things keep on changing time to time. So it's best to go online and see what's the current data. So what's happening globally in the digital world. So we just go to this link. And I think you can see it is ignore the advertisements because it is an online portal. So you can see my screen. Yeah, okay. So as of towards the end of 2023, we can see that about 65% of the world's population are online, they're using the internet. I mean, 65% you know, yes, it's not, you know, 100% it's not the whole world. But it's definitely a huge percentage, you know, 65% of the world are connected to the internet, they're online. And it's growing. Right. It's increased, you know, by so almost almost 4% year on year, things are increasing. And you look at the internet use over time, you can see steady increase, it means more and more people, individuals are connecting are being connected online. Right. So this gives us a great opportunity. If we can leverage the internet, we have the potential of reaching a huge part of the world's population, you know, just online, because they are there. Now, of course, we have to take into account language. Not everybody is speaking English, but a good percentage will speak English. We have taken into account how they're accessing the internet. A good percentage will be using mobile phones. Some will be maybe on computer laptop, other those kinds of devices. And so on. So, you know, we have to take those things with take those things into account, of course, but there's so this gives us such a big opportunity. Right. And let's look at these things here. The out of the total population. You've got about 5.6 billion people who are phone subscribers. 69% have a mobile phone. 65% using the internet. And 61% are in some form of social media. So this is a great opportunity. Again, you know, for us to understand that there are people that we can reach online, through the internet, through social media, and they are connected using their mobile phones. Sorry, sorry. You can read this is a lot of information that we can read about, sorry, but all the ads here. So, and this whole presentation is something you can look into. And I'm just going to go to some of the digital reports. I'm sorry, these ads here, top 10 trends. It's the same data here. Okay, so it's got a lot of this data. I'm not necessarily going to go through all of them. But the point is this data is available, and you can look at what is happening. So you can see, you know, in terms of male and female, how many people generally are online. And, you know, there's a lot of other data they want to highlight some things you can see where, from different parts of the world, what the population of people who are online. And so, you know, try to think about this, you know, there's such a huge population from Southern Asia, East Asia, that are online. So huge percentage, huge numbers of people, I should say, online from different these regions, Asia, East Asia, or online reaching, and it gives us an opportunity to reach them. So think, think about this, you know, we can be sitting here somewhere in India, Asia, and we have access to reaching so many millions of these numbers are millions of people all over the world, what an opportunity. So we can reach people all across. And there's a lot of other information, I'm not going to go through all of this data. The other other piece of information that we can also look at, that I've linked to in the again, this is another website that gives us data status term. So this is as of October 23, a number of internet users, number of social media users. Let me also click on the other one. We look at the, you know, so what are people doing online? Right? Of course, people are trading online a lot. But then look at the number of emails, what's our messages, the global hours that are spent online. And then what do we see? We see a lot of people searching online. All right. So that's an opportunity like if people are searching online. Yeah, if we can, you know, make use of that when people are searching, can they find us? People are spending a lot of time on Facebook posts, doing things on Facebook. They're spending a lot of time watching Reels or sending on Instagram. They're spending a lot of time on shopping on Amazon. Some are on Twitter. And some are also streaming songs online. So you see, this is where people are spending time online. You know, what are people doing? They're watching content on Twitch as well. So these are, you know, so we get an idea, okay, this is what people are doing online. Can we in some way, engage in some way connect to what people are doing, what they're spending their time on? Right? So it's good to have this kind of information. So we can look at what's going on. What are, okay, this data is a little old, almost one year old. But what are the most popular apps that people are using? Actually, what's have lots of people are using WhatsApp. So that's a good thing. So we need to see how we can leverage that. And of course, and there are other apps that people also use. But many people are on WhatsApp can be, they used to be a time when SMS was a big thing. But now you know, people are moved away from that and spending more time engaging on WhatsApp. So we can try and leverage that or connected people using that kind of information. So so it's good for us to just stay in touch with current trends. I've just given you some links here. For us to say, okay, this is what people are doing online. This is where people are spending their time. This is the kind of media they're consuming. You saw that they people are spending, you know, time watching shot reels. You know, so that means they're not necessarily watching, I mean, of course, people are spending lots of time watching movies and so on. But in terms of total time that people are spending, shot reels, right? So can we do things there that will connect with people, people want to spend one minute, two minutes, watch something interesting, keep moving on. So can we do things that so it's good to understand where people are spending their time, where they are so we can reach. The other thing that we must keep in mind when we're thinking about using media and technology is to understand different generations. And again, a data is available online on all of this. And I'll just try to summarize some of these thoughts. Understanding different generations, right? So sociologists people who study society and generations, they, they, they classify generations in groups of every 15 years, every 15 years, right? So the generations that we are interested in, because we can go all the way from earlier generations, the baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, alpha and beta, the slope out in the future, because of the future. But every 15 years is a generation. So some of us belong to the baby boomers in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Gen Z, X, Gen Y, and then the Gen Z, which is basically 95 to 2010, that range, right? And then you have the Gen Alpha, it's 2010 to the current year that we are about that 15 year period. So, and we can study, you know, each of these generations to see how we are engaging with media and technology, and what has been the impact. And there's one Christian organization that has done a lot of study on it, and they put out there, they've shared their study online, so you could go to global youth culture, not net and look at that research. But I'm just summarizing some of the things that they have found. And it's not too long ago, 2020 research, just asking Gen Z the questions. So remember, Gen Z would be people who, you know, maybe in their teens to their, so the late 20s, right, the teens of the late 20s, they're there in that range. And what here's just a summary of that research, right? They found out that this generation, and if you look at people that we are trying to reach the teens, the young adults, that's basically Gen Z that we're trying to look at. What do we find? We find that they're also they're the least religious generation ever. They have moved away from conventional expressions of faith, trying to define faith on their own, you know, okay, I will figure this out, I will make my own philosophy and I'll be my own. So in terms of following conventional faith, they are least religious doesn't mean that they have no interest in God. It just means that they are trying to define things on their own. And some of them in their journey may end up saying there's no God, but they're trying to define things. They're digital natives, that means they were born, you know, with some digital, you know, with digital things all around them, they were born into this world. So almost from the moment they were born, they were exposed to all kinds of digital tools and content, they're constantly connected. They're entrepreneurial, they like to, you know, try out new things, step out new things. The way they learn is very different. They're self learners, that means they go and find out, you know, if they want to learn something, go on YouTube, find it, learn, you know, it's not like, oh, I have to go to school, right, I can something to learn. No, they're self they can learn and they will learn whatever they want, because content is there for them, readily available. And they're also very ambitious. So this is the summary of the findings, the lot more details that you can look at. But, you know, what, what is the impact of all this on their lives, on the lives of these people? And this is, you know, interesting. They don't believe, they don't believe that if you're online, it has to compromise your authenticity. That means you can be authentic. You know, of course, we know that a lot of false things happen online. We know that. But they also the gen, we're talking about Gen C, the teens and young adults, they feel that, hey, I can be just myself. You know, so I what you see is things that I'm expressing, I can be authentic, I can be real. But you know, we know that some things are not always that. So 55% say that who they are on who they are on social media is somewhat close to who they are in real life. The large number feel that they are actually authentic, not fake, makes them feel confident and included. And a lot of them also would like to remain anonymous. And, you know, they can handle multiple social media accounts and it's just something they do easily work through. So for them, it is what's interesting is they don't see social media as an enemy of authenticity. Many of us by default, you say, you know, who people that's not the real person, but they don't perceive it like that. They look at it as a space where they can say what they want to say, express what they want to express freely and stay anonymous, not, you know, not necessarily want to reveal themselves. So that's an interesting finding. Another interesting thing is they are heavily connected, you know, almost eight hours, you know, they spend almost eight hours online connected. They are constantly connected. Majority of the teens and younger adults have their own phone. They if they don't have the phone, they have anxiety. And this is a new thing. It's like a smartphone separation anxiety, they're like, Hey, where's my phone? I haven't checked my phone the last five minutes or something like that. That's a negative impact that they all feel. They can't handle being separated from their phone. And but it also has the result of sleep deprivation. I mean, there's so much of time is consumed on that. And it's impacting their mental health. So that's something you need to recognize the impact of it. A lot of this is this is more specific to us teens, they spend so many hours on social media. And it affects them emotionally. It doesn't pack them. And they can feel depressed, which leads them to so subtle thoughts, right? So that's the impact, a negative impact of being online so much and how it's affecting people. And there are other aspects as well. Like we mentioned, the entrepreneurial, the self learners, I mean, they learn a lot. So education itself has been redefined in terms of Gen Z and because of the internet and generation alpha. So there's an interesting study online. I'll click on this because I think it's useful to know it's there that you could go and look at I'll see they have a free PDF here. It's a nice infographic that you can look at. I think I'll we have this somewhere. Okay, wait a minute. All right, let me just think I'll read downloaded this one minute. Just give me a moment. All right, let me just share this share my screen. Okay, so this is that that graphic that you can just download from that lane. So basically, what it's what it's saying is that when you look at different generations, X, generation X, Y and Z and and the number of people who are in the workforce, and generation alpha, that are slow, some of them are slowly coming into the workforce. You know, they're just trying to help us understand what are the characteristics of these, these different generations. And each each generation is, you know, has grown up with different technologies, different ways of learning, and so on. Okay, maybe this is. Yeah. So again, you can look at it, you know, in detail, the technology that are coming in or things that are, you know, which gen Z gen alpha are very comfortable with. The iPads, the Instagram, having Siri and other voice assistance, and so on. And all of the these things that all the generation, the baby boomers, the gen X, those things are being slowly going out. Whereas these new technologies are what is coming in, which the Gen Z and Gen Alpha are in a family of it, and also the change in the kinds of jobs. If you look at the lowest row, the new kinds of jobs that are coming in, which these then the incoming generation are comfortable with. And here's, you know, are the same thing is kind of put in a vertical way, the toys, the music devices, the leadership styles on the screen content. So generally, the builders, as that's, you know, we may not have too many of them, but 1924 1945 generation. Yeah, the leadership style has met, you know, was very unilateral controlling. They watched cinema, cinemas, maybe boomers was again, similar, very directing. We had televisions coming in. Gen X, more of coordinators, we had VHS tapes then. Gen Y, that's more of guiding. The internet came on. Gen Z, their teens and young adults, they're comfortable with empowering their onto mobile devices. The Gen Alpha, it's more of inspiring leadership that they're comfortable with more of streaming, watching things online, so on. That's how they can do. So it's just interesting to look at this information. And you can click on this link, Generation Alpha, and you can download the PDF. So that just so that the main point I want us to understand is how we communicate to different generations. We need to understand, right? So understand how Gen Gen Z, which other teens, young adults, Gen Alpha, just coming on Gen X and Gen Y, how these different generations, how they're relating to technology, what kind of media are they comfortable consuming? How they are engaging online, we need to understand these different generations so that we can prepare our content and we can use tools very meaningfully to target these generations. Okay, so let me pause you and see the any questions before we jump into our next chapter. Maybe we can go for a break and come back. Any thoughts, any comments, any questions so far with the introduction with what we're going to cover in this course and anything we've just spoken about now. Any questions, any thoughts? Everyone's fine? Okay, all right. Okay, so what I want to just bring our attention to before we go for the break is that we must be open to using contemporary methods in Christian minister, right? That means we should not think that media and technology are evil because in general, I'm speaking generally, in times past that was a default reaction from the church, you know, when television came first, oh that was a bad, that is the, you know, there was, you know, box, that is hell coming in, all kinds of people, I'm talking about the church generally, I'm speaking in general terms, I'm not saying everybody did it, but generally people say, oh no, television is such a evil thing. Then slowly people realize, hey, you can actually use television to preach the gospel and then we had a lot of Christian stations and preachers and people getting on television and they started, you know, bringing Christian programming on TV, in the middle of all the other things that are around, of course there's a lot of bad that the people were doing and then there's the general stuff, which is the news and other entertainment kind of things, but then the church realized we can use television to reach people. Same thing happened when the internet, you know, came on and said, oh no, internet don't go online, it's evil, it's on, so forth. Then he was, hey, we can actually use the internet to reach people and we can have a website, we can put out content and so on and so as new things, new media, new forms of media, new tools in technology become available, I think our response should not be, oh, it's an evil thing, don't engage, don't use, no. Our response should be, let me understand this and see how I can use it for kingdom work, for the sake of the gospel. Of course, a lot of other people will be using it, you know, to spread wrong things, evil things, that is their part, but we should look at, how can I use this, you know, for good? So even with recent advancements, like since last year, suddenly after Chan, GPT was released and then everybody started understanding about AI and you know, artificial intelligence and machine learning as well and you know, how should the church respond to it? I feel that we should look at, hey, how can I use that for the sake of the gospel? How can I use these, AI is just a tool, it's not replacing human beings, it's just a tool that we have created, we have made that we can, you know, take advantage of. So our response should be, how can I use this tool for the sake of the gospel? How can I put it to use to serve people? You know, and there are a lot of opportunities, even with the recent advancements in AI and machine learning that we can actually use for the sake of the gospel. And they've already started, already started using it, you know, and so we have to think like that and rather than by default saying any new thing is bad, we should be able to take it and say let's see how to use it. Okay, so with that let's pause for now and we'll come back and then we start, you know, getting into some more thoughts here that we want to share. Let's take a break and we'll come back in at 11 o'clock, a little longer break I think, 15 minutes, but it's okay. Just take your break and then we'll come back. Okay, see you in a few minutes, thanks.