The not-so emerald Isle

"Dear ladies and gentlemen, we are 20 minutes from landing in Dublin. The bad news is the airport has closed because of the snow, so we'll be in a holding pattern for a little while as they clear the runway to land."

So began my trip to Ireland! When I left Switzerland it had been raining. I wasn't expecting a winter wonderland in Ireland. David Coffey, my student for the week, picked me up at the airport. I'm glad he did. My plan to take the bus would have gone awry since the bus service to Belfast was canceled due to the weather. We were able to get a room in a nearby hotel and thankfully made it without incident. Waking up the next morning, we looked out to see the world still in it's white blanket. We got a typical Irish breakfast – eggs, ham, sausage and porridge – and headed to our destination, the Child Evangelism Fellowship® camp center of Seaview in Kilkeel. We arrived safely after hitting the grocery store and started unpacking our gear: an iMac, a laptop, power cables, note pads, our luggage and our fresh groceries (which surprised our wives – real food, not bachelor food!).

Our training time began with a time of prayer. I had never done something like this before, and needed the Lord's guidance. Sharing how to use the tools given in Adobe® InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator is one thing. Teaching the concepts of graphic design is another. Oh sure, we did cover a lot of "how-to's" during our time, but when David took the Design Software Course I had given in January, I noticed his layout skills and natural eye for design. Not everyone has it. When I later learned that he was leaving his position as an area director for CEF in Ireland to go to the national office to become the layout person, I had the vision of coming alongside and coaching him.

We spent three and a half days looking at design topics like motion, balance, negative space. We also went through the design process … starting with creating thumbnails. As in the course in January, we covered what the printer needed: bleeds, margins, printer marks, color profiles and more. After several days at Seaview, we packed up to move to the Irish national office, but first we visited the CEF Specialized Book Ministry. They were gracious enough to take us out to lunch, and we got a chance to see their facilities.

Besides the great time with David, the biggest highlight of the trip was visiting Revival Movement, a ministry CEF teams up with to provide evangelistic literature to children around the world. Samuel Adams, who directs the work there, met us warmly and gave us a tour of the facilities. It was impressive. Using several web presses and a large-format sheet-fed press, Revival Movement prints five tons of evangelical material a day! This is not material to be sold in a Christian bookstore – it's all for handing out to people around the world so they can know the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. While there, we saw several rolls of Meet the King!, the evangelistic tract I designed and my co-worker, Tim Shirey, illustrated. What a blessing! Other material for CEF was in the various stages of production as well in multiple languages, as well as the gospel of John, New Tribes Mission materials and an assortment of other items. Just like CEF relies on supporters, Revival Movement cannot operate without churches and people giving. Check them out at http://revivalmovement.org.

All work and no play isn't so nice when visiting a country for the very first time, so we had a chance to visit the Silent Valley, as well as take a tour of Belfast. It was an incredible time.

I ask that you please pray for David and his wife, Kathy, as they get settled into working at the CEF national office in Ireland. Taking the reigns of the literature ministry is not an easy task, especially with a very limited printing background.

Lord-willing, I'll be heading back to Ireland some day. Next time, with the family!

Photos, from top, going clockwise: the Silent Valley; the huge amounts of literature waiting to be shipped at Revival Movement; Brent with Kathy and David Coffey; rolls of Meet the King! which had just been printed.

All together

It's a rare sight to have all the Kilchzimmer workers together at one time, so when we were able to gather together this past Monday, we commemorated it with a group photo. We included the long term volunteers as well. When you look at who is working at Kilchzimmer, you get quite a mixed group – a lot of countries are represented: Germany, Ireland, Britain, the USA, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. That diverse group shows the unity that Christ brings. We have different backgrounds, but one goal … winning children for Christ! We're proud to work in this team, and thank God for them.

Amy's first photo shoot

It's been a busy week. The Multimedia department was given an assignment of creating three complete custom PowerPoint presentations in a week-and-a-half. We had to create slides from scratch, using imagery that wasn't already provided. So what did we do? We had multiple photo shoots! The presentations, all of which are promotional tools, focused on the book Meet the King!, Wondersurf.com and multimedia items. We needed a photo of a grandmother sharing Meet the King! with her granddaughter, so we used Amy and her Swiss Godmother, Liz. Tim Shirey did the photography, using just his flash and the white walls and ceiling to bounce. He also masked out the color on the entire image except for the book they're looking at. We're all very happy with the result.

You may ask "why do we do promotional materials? Aren't you focused on creating materials for children?" We're creating these so more churches can know what Child Evangelism Fellowship® can do to help them reach children in their community. It also explains the various projects in case someone would like to pray and give. We're hoping these presentations can be used in a mighty way to expand the work of CEF®!

Life of Christ 1

I sometimes feel like the Energizer Bunny, things just keep on going with these Good News Club® resource packs! I'm in the middle (actually hopefully near the end) of the pack for the CEF® lesson Life of Christ 1. This lesson begins with annunciation and finishes with the Lord Jesus calling his disciples. It's been a lot of fun, but there's always room for improvement. As a lover of maps, I really enjoyed researching for the maps included in the pack. Although simple, hopefully they'll help teacher better show where events took place. These packs have taken the lion's share of my time the last few weeks, but Lord-willing, it will help boys and girls know more about our Savior!

NEW! Car project update

We weren't planning on updating this so quickly, but we praise the Lord for our sending church which has pledged $3,000 toward our vehicle. We're not far from our goal! Please rejoice with us! Please also pray we can quickly raise the remaining amount.

One down …

For the last several months I've been busily working on the Good News Club® resource packet for the lesson Beginnings. It's been a huge undertaking, working on word strips, Bible verse visuals, tokens, worksheets, maps and other assorted materials for a Good News Club. It was certainly challenging when trying to figure out how to illustrate concepts or Bible verses like Romans 5:12. It was a fun project to work on, but this is just the beginning of a five-year cycle!Three daughters of students taking the three-monthChildren's Ministry Leadership Course helped by testing all the worksheets, and Andrea Weir was a huge help, looking for art, proofreading and doing a lot of leg work. We've already started working on The Life of Christ 1, and still have many more lessons to do! Please pray for us as we needslots of creativity, sensitivity to those doing the layout in other translations and of course, that it would all be true to the Word of God!

Remembering Gabi

Yesterday morning, the Lord took our dear friend and co-worker, Gabi Bienen, home to be with Him. Gabi's life touched a lot of people. Letters from around the world continue to pour in offering condolences, attesting to the impact she had. Gabi was a worker. She made sure her job was done right. She usually sang while cleaning and was always laughing at my lame jokes during coffee break. She loved pulling practical jokes on Henry Berry, the national leader for CEF® in Ireland, sometimes filling his room with flowers or cleaning supplies or talking about "Bernhard," her imaginary boyfriend.

Yesterday, Jen was explaining to Amy that we wouldn't see Gabi anymore. She said "Gabi did something very special today … Jesus came and took her home." Amy immediately asked, "Did he hold her?" Jen, fighting back the tears replied, "All the way home."

Please pray for us at this time. It's tough. It was sudden and unexpected. She died peacefully in her sleep, at a mere 49 years old. We rejoice she is in the loving arms of the Savior, but we miss her.

I got it right … almost

Sometimes I have to take a lot of photos for my projects. Most of the time they're terrible. Once in a while, I get it right. Today was one of those rare days when I "got one right." (For all those other days, there's Photoshop). Unfortunately, this particular shot wasn't the primary reason I took her photo – I needed one of her praying. This one happened to be done at the end of the shoot while clowning around . Very little was done to this photo post-edit, it just happened. Thank you Lord!

Bulgaria … finally!

We gathered around the kitchen table. Four laptops and one video projector, all spewing out heat on an already blistering day. Pens, pencils, notepads, handouts, worksheets, whiteboards and cell phones were all arranged between us so we could barely see the tablecloth. Welcome to the design software course in Bulgaria. It was an eager group of students gathered, two from Bulgaria and two from Greece, all full of questions, not wanting to miss a thing. Terms like "bleed", "trim", "mask", "leading" and "spread" were almost daily occurrences and sometimes had to be illustrated in funny ways. No matter how often the cell phone rang or how high the temperature got, they kept at it, always wanting to learn more. Photoshop was a big hit, but even simple things like "tabs" and "style sheets" in InDesign brought about "oohs' and "aahs." That was my favorite part – hearing someone say "Oh! I wish I would have known about this sooner!" Camera basics, Adobe Bridge and Illustrator were also covered.

Saving time. Saving money … ministry money. That's what this course was about. If I can show my students how to properly set up a file so the printer can print it on time and on budget, we allow more children the opportunity to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the printed word. So far this has taken me to Czech Republic, Romania, Armenia and now, Bulgaria. I've taught this course several times at Kilchzimmer. Where next? Only God knows! But I do know this: I'm ready!

Bulgaria bound

Monday morning, June 14, Brent heads to Bulgaria to train the CEF® Bulgarian and Greek multimedia teams to use graphic design software. This will help both Bulgaria and Greece better create and produce materials that will evangelize children and help saved children grow in the Word.

Please pray for safe travels, problem-free equipment and wisdom and strength for Brent as he teaches between 8-10 hours a day. Pray too, for the four students who will be taking the course in English, that what is taught can be done clearly and effectively and they would have good understanding of what is taught.

Please also pray for Jen and the children as they are at home during this time.

Brent hopes to have a few updates as the week goes on, but we're not sure how often he'll be able to be online.

Thanks!

Every Day with God

We're excited to be working withCEF® International Headquarters to produce a daily devotional for young readers. The project, called "Every Day with God" will be a 30-day devotional book aimed at 6-8 year olds and will include a Bible verse, application, narrative/interactive, activity and prayer. This project is especially close to Jen and my heart since Amy will start reading in the next few years. The first book centers around the books of Genesis and Exodus. If things go well with the first book, (Lord-willing) we'll be producing six books in all, to be used around the world!

We've been working on the designs, which has been a monumental task. Coming up with several different ideas on one project can take a long time, and this was no exception. The initial designs were submitted this week, but I thought I'd give you a sneak preview of all three designs. Now it's up to the children to pick which one they'd like! It's so far been tested here in Switzerland with children from three different nationalities, and has been sent to several other countries for input from children. This is such an important part of the design process, because oftentimes adults think they know what the children like, but the designs children choose are often opposite of what the adults thought they would be. If you have children between 6-8, please show them all three of these designs and let me know what they thought of them!

A new era

After 16 years as the Regional Directors for CEF in Europe, Roy and Ruth Harrison have handed the reigns over to Gerd-Walter Buskies. The handover took place at the Conference, and it was an amazing, yet bittersweet event. Bittersweet because of how close we have gotten with Roy and Ruth during our seven years at Kilchzimmer. They've been tremendous encouragers to Jen and I over the years. Yet it was joyful as we're very excited to have Gerd-Walter leading us. His energy, wisdom and insight are gifts from God which will allow CEF to continue reaching Europe's children. Please pray for Gerd-Walter – that God would guide his steps every day.

Photo of Gerd-Walter, Ruth and Roy Harrison by Markus Malzner. Used with permission.

Conference time!

On Monday, May 10, I got a chance to walk Amy to school for one last "goodbye." It was such a bittersweet time … knowing it would be more than a week before I see the family again, but at the same time knowing I'll be reconnecting with CEF® family members.

We arrived nearly four hours later at Schwäbisch Gmünd, and started our time stuffing our faces at a Chinese Buffet! Not the Jade in Harrisburg, but close. I remember smiling as I watched one

person in our party eat only fries and sweet and sour chicken. Oh, the tastes he missed! After overeating, we made our way to the conference center, Schönblick. This place is much larger

than the conference center in Rehe, where we've had the last several conferences. The main auditorium seated more than 1,000 people and had a fully stocked sound, lighting and video camera system. Needless to say it was much more advanced than anything I've ever tackled! After an hour-long training session with Uli, the main technician in Schönblick, I was off and running, operating the faders like a pro!

The conference staff got started getting everything ready: name tags, conference and prayer guides (in English, German and Russian) water bottles, contest inserts, toys for the children, mugs and pens, all going inside a special cloth bag. We had rooms to set up and equipment to load, and had a video chat with Jen and the children to let them know we arrived safely. Homesickness set in.

What kept me from blogging during the entire conference? 16-20 hour work days. My typical day at the conference was:

• 7:30 prayer time and staff meeting.
• Getting song slides ready for the two morning sessions and evening session. (this included fixing most of the songs as we realized we created the song slides to be used on a smaller projection screen.
• Putting slides together for several of the speakers.
• Ran the lights and multimedia presentations for the main sessions. (Keynote was the software I used, and it ran great!)
• Make announcement slides for the information desk.
• Taking photos (which didn't happen much – major kudos to Andrea Weir and Markus Malzner, who stepped up to the plate in my stead).
• Create door signs, print them out and put them at the correct places.
• Accepted photos for a photography contest and categorized all of them. Tim Shirey and I also selected the winners for the contest, which was pretty hard to do!
• Guided folks to the correct seminar room and helped set up A/V equipment.
• Practice for my seminar on "Better Presentations" which I gave on Saturday morning. (I also held another seminar on the Adobe Creative Suite and how I did a few of the more difficult things in my layouts of materials.)
• Had many short meetings with conference attendees to discuss anything from layout difficulties to training sessions to camera types.
• and lots of tiny details which I did, but forgot about. Whew. My head hurts just looking back at the list!

So how can I sum up the conference? It was the absolute busiest conference I've worked at so far, but it was by far the best. There's nothing like getting between 350-450 people together who have one goal – evangelizing children with the unchanging gospel of Jesus Christ. I'll use a few other blogs to share more specifics, but I am so thankful and grateful to have taken part in such a huge undertaking. Thank you for praying for us all during this busy time. I can't thank you enough for bringing myself and the whole family before the throne of Almighty God.

Photos courtesy of Markus Malzner and Andrea Weir.

Hopp Schwiiz!

It was a lot of fun having the Swiss CEF team at Kilchzimmer the past few days. These workers, who are all from the Swiss-German speaking region, have a burden for the children of Switzerland. We hope they were encouraged and refreshed here on the mountain and can return to their ministry fired up! As I share this, would you please lift them up in prayer. Switzerland is a tough country to have ministry in. Humanism, materialism and apathy for things of Christ work against the reaching of children. All of these workers raise their own support, and even though Switzerland is a very wealthy country, it is very difficult raise funds. There are also three other regions in Switzerland that do not have a large active ministry – the French, Italian and Romantsch-speaking regions. Please pray for people of God's choosing to join the work to serve in these needy areas. Thanks!

Photo challenges and results

Sometimes we're faced with taking photos ourselves when the World Wide Web lets us down. I've joined a number of stock photo Web sites and regularly use photos that cost very little or are free. Sometimes, however, there just isn't a photo there that matches the idea I've got in my head. That's when we ask for volunteers from local families. The Künzli family has always been ready to help and since they have six children, there's always the age range I'm looking for. My project is for a Bible correspondence course starter lesson that will be distributed with Meet the King books. The design needs to have continuity between the two, but my general idea came from a fantastic flyer CEF Germany did.

I took two hundred photos of the children, but since I'm still not a very good photographer, there were problems with the files. I narrowed my selections down to two of the best. In these two photos the color temperature is different, something that I needed to fix. I also had nasty

looking shadowing on the boy's collar. I had to tone that down a bit, too. Had I used a diffuser, I could have taken care of that problem before the shoot.

In Bridge and Photoshop I did my color-correcting, masked them out and placed them in my InDesign document. Overall, not a bad product. I'm hoping and praying many children can learn of the love of the Lord Jesus Christ through the lessons!

Learning together

The past two weeks have been absolutely incredible. I had eight students, all CEF® workers, from Europe, Asia and the Middle East who took part in the Design Software Course. They were a great group, full of fun and laughter. We took a trip to a large print shop where they could see how products are printed. There were also a very inquisitive group, and I got a chance to learn alongside them. We had workers from Austria, France, Ireland, Jordan and a closed country. Sam Beck, a co-worker from Kilchzimmer and Andrea Weir, a volunteer with the Multimedia Department also joined in and were wonderful students. Because of safety issues for several of the students, I had to digitize their faces in the photos. Please pray for these students who will be having a huge impact for Christ among the children around the world!

Brent helping Ojini, from Jordan. Photos by Tim Shirey.

Planning, Preparations & Prayers

Whew, it's been a crazy week, and it's only going to get crazier. I'm in the middle of preparing for a new design software course, which starts on Sunday evening. The last time I taught one of these courses was two years ago. Back then, we focused entirely on the Adobe Creative Suite, CS. This time, I'll be teaching CS3, which includes InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat and includes seminars on the printing process, simple design techniques and working with a printer. My co-worker, Tim, will be teaching seminars on photography and Adobe Bridge. We'll also be visiting a print shop. Since changing software versions, there's a lot of changes and updates to the classes, handouts and exercises.

Tim and I would really appreciate your prayers for wisdom, strength, good health and endurance over the next two weeks. We still have lots of planning to do and many preparations to make. Please also pray for the eight students who, Lord-willing, will be attending. This has the potential to reach many more children with the Gospel!

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng/Majoros Attila.

December happenings

It's been a wild and crazy December, and there's still several more weeks to go! We said a sad farewell to the Van Eck family, who flew back to South Africa on December 3. Brent drove them to the airport and with tears in his eyes said goodbye. The Van Ecks became good friends over the past five years and we will sorely miss them.

We got our Christmas tree that next weekend and the kids had fun decorating it. Of course mommy and daddy had to fine-tune the placement of them, but it's a nice little tree.

A few days later we hosted a Christmas Club at our house. The local CEF® worker, Trudy Heininger, came to give the gospel story. Unfortunately, no children from our village of Holderbank came, but we did have two children from our church. We discussed it, and even though the results were disappointing, we're going to try again next year. It was certainly a learning experience for us. God isn't interested in our performance. He's interested in our obedience. All we can do is to keep on trying and praying.

Brent chaired his first meeting ever the next day at the Kilchzimmer workers' meeting. It was certainly harder than he thought and wasn't sure how well he did until he was unanimously chosen to lead the next one. (He still thinks it was because no one else wanted the job!)

Jen's been very busy too, baking Christmas cookies, sending out cards, wrapping presents and preparing for our Christmas open house, which is on the 22nd. Please pray for us as we have a chance to share the true meaning of Christmas with those who come. Merry Christmas!

It's here!

We praise the Lord that Brent's new computer arrived! It is such a blessing to have a machine like this after his old one died last month. Thank you to all of you who gave toward this project, and we especially want to thank the children of Schuylkill County who gave this summer!

We have a lot of new projects that have been waiting, and now we can jump right in with this new machine and create more materials that will spread the Gospel throughout Europe.

For all you techies: it's a 27" iMac with an Intel i5 processor, 8 gigs of Ram, 1TB Hard drive and a second monitor.

Eight years

Eight years ago today we officially came on board with CEF. I remember going into the meeting with the board of trustees and answering lots of questions, but what I remember most while we were waiting for the board's decision we were pacing the hallway of (what was then known as) the Conference Center. Jim came out of the room, extended his hand and simply said "Welcome to CEF". It was as if a ton of bricks had been lifted from our shoulders and I burst into tears in thankfulness to God!