Nov 04 2020 23 mins 3
At long last, this is a new podcast episode! In this episode we address a couple of basic questions about what we do here in Eastern Europe, including: Who are you and what do you do?Why make a podcast?Why is Bosnia "strategic"?Why is important to "bring people together"? Here are the notes / script for the episode -- you can read here, or just plug in the earphones and listen. Enjoy! Who are you and what do you do? My name is Jonathan, and I work with young people and college students in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I run a local Christian ministry to teens and students int eh city of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I am on the staff of Cru, which is a big international Christian ministry organization. This is the first podcast in a very long time, so I want to give that introduction, since many of you might be listening to this episode as your first ever listen to us. I am a Protestant Christian, and my opinions and conclusions that I share here will come from that viewpoint and perspective. You are welcome to disagree with those conclusions — not everyone needs to agree with us in order to listen — and it is likely that we might disagree, because my experiences are most likely very different from the majority of American Christians. So from time to time I am probably going to share something here that reflects on international relations or political crises or dilemmas, stories from world history, and other things that will be interesting to a very wide range of people in our audience. So, hopefully, we will talk about some things that are interesting to everyone out there as we go through all the things that affect us here in the region where we are, Eastern Europe. It will not be just a continuous conversation about theology, though I am a theology student. It will not be just a dissection of Christian doctrine. The podcast will be a discussion of different things that I have learned as a foreigner living in a strange land for the last 10+ years. So we will touch on a lot of different issues and conversations that people are having around the world. We will talk about things generally from a Christian perspective, but we will acknowledge that there are other perspectives out there in the world, and that people listening to us might have different ways of looking at things. We will certainly always attempt to be respectful, and treat everyone with dignity that they deserve — As the book of 1 Peter in the New Testament says, Treat everyone with high regard: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God. Why a Podcast? There are many reasons to do a podcast. 1. It's easy. It’s an easy way to get in touch with all of you and let you know what we are doing. And we have many, many friends, supporters, donors, and followers who we want to connect with and keep up with back home in the US. It may sound like a complicated thing, but in reality this is a very simple enterprise. It’s just me and my computer and a couple of little gadgets, sitting down to a personal conversation with all of you. Ideas are great, and they are of course more personal, but they are hard to set up and produce - there are lights and picture and sound; podcasts are a lot more simple and provide us with a way to do more personal communication without getting into video. This is a budget podcast, and it will stay that way. We might have some guests on in the future, some more family members, but in general it will be just another way for me to connect with all of you on a budget. 2. It allows us to produce long-form content. Let’s be honest - we are overloaded with all the social media bite-sized posts, clips, articles, links, etc etc etc. Most of the things you read from me fit a different niche in your information diet, and podcasting lends itself to that niche. It allows me to go deeper into my content, provide some longer answers to questions that we often get about our work,
