Supernatural Beginnings
The History of How Mission Media Ministries, Inc. Began
Life changing events and earth shattering occasions that forever shape one’s destiny rarely happen except in the movies. In real life myriad little events and seemingly minor decisions culminate over the years into what one hopes is a productive and worthwhile life. The trick is in making consistent and faithful decisions in the little things that ultimately bring about God’s ends. We may make our plans but the Lord ordains our footsteps. This, in hindsight, is what we at the Urban Family Council believe has been turning about with the Mission Media project. God has taken a vision imparted back in 1990, and through a series of unanticipated events, brought about its fulfillment these seven years later. It has been wondrous in our eyes.
God interrupted the college career of Bob Jacobus back in 1989 ultimately resulting in his conversion to Christianity and departure from a career in film and television. He began studying for a position in pastoral care focusing on apologetics and church history at a number of different Christian colleges along the East Coast. He developed what we can most generously call a preoccupation with communicating the evidence of the faith seeing a distinctive loss in the society’s beliefs about Jesus Christ, Christian faith, and morality. Social pathologies like teen suicide, drug abuse, and adolescent crime were (and are) generally on the rise. The Christian Church was falling into a place of irrelevance whenever public policy and morality were discussed or portrayed by the modern story tellers in television.
It was out of this frustration the concept of "Mission Media" was given birth. It was a vision with two facets. God did not leave us without evidence to persuade people He exists and the Bible is His explicit instruction to mankind. The heavens and earth speak volumes of the engineer who set life and creation in motion. The Bible is authenticated by containing a record of history centuries before it came to pass. The Church needed (and needs) to recapture and proclaim the immensity of these sure proofs.
Secondly, the Church needed to be persuasively proclaiming the message in the areas of influence presently dominating the modern mind. Just as Paul contended for the truth before the philosophers of the Roman Areopagus the Church needed to bring the underpinnings of the truth to bear on the modern secular media.
Great idea, but no way to implement the strategy. Bob was studying for pastoral ministry with no intention of returning to a career in television. Time marched on and the vision perished. Graduation approached and Seminary preparations began. Unbeknownst to Bob, a greater plan was at work. He took an internship at the local CBS affiliate in Philadelphia to round out a second major based on his prior secular collegiate work. A few weeks later a job was offered and taken. Months later a part time job turned into a full time plus commitment and Bob promptly dropped out of Seminary.
Two years later, the weight of a career in the moral vacuum of TV combined with a perceived call to ministry left him restless. Then it dawned on Bob, God had prepared him to proceed with taking the Gospel to network television and the vision was resurrected. He traveled around the country pitching the idea with little response. The project languished for a year until June, 1997 when a student Bob was mentoring sent him an article about a young man in Boise, Idaho with the exact same concept in production! Contact was made and a union forged. Michael Boerner of Mission Media: Boise accelerated our process by donating his experience and some commercials to Philadelphia. We think it was more than coincidence he began work in 1990 in Boise as the idea developed at the same time in Philadelphia. The launch solidified when the Executive Director of the UFC, William Devlin, saw the 30 second spots and caught the vision. Bob joined staff in late August, 1997 and after two years established Mission Media Ministries, Inc. to stand in the gap - functioning as a intermediary for the local church to the modern media.
This page was last updated on 06/03/03.