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"Oh, love the Lord, all you His saints! For the Lord preserves the faithful, and fully repays the proud person."

Psalm 31:23

BEHIND THE SCENES

The advanced Kodiak cockpit

August 14, 2008

by Ian Fallis

Do you want to take a look inside?

Most folks do. That’s why tourists who are already spending a bundle on a Disneyworld vacation often add a VIP tour. It’s why concert-goers love backstage passes. And it’s why getting to see behind the scenes was one of my favorite perks of being a newspaper reporter.

And if you can get that kind of treatment free, hey, that’s even better.

So … do you want a free look inside?

You can’t see the indirect results of the ministry you’re involved as part of our team. Thousands of people are praying each day, hundreds are able to give online and through other methods, and dozens are becoming missionaries, in part because of the website and videos and radio spots and print pieces we help put together.

But let me take you inside …

Here’s the inside story of how our new Special Report: The Kodiak came to be.

One of my responsibilities is website strategy. It’s part of heading up our overall communications strategy, but like everything I do, it’s done in close cooperation with the other folks on our leadership team. That would be Macon Hare, Andy Corley and Patrick Hatcher.

The team approach helps us watch each other’s blind spots, and the trust and respect we have for each other helps us stay of each other’s way.

We’ve felt the need for a special report on the new Kodiak airplane for some time, and recently saw that the timing was right and the impact it could have on NTM’s ministry was high, so I started to work on it.

The first step was to determine what would be in the report and how it would be presented. Patrick Hatcher had recently completed a booklet for folks who were interested in giving toward NTM’s Kodiak project, and that provided a good blueprint for the approach as well as a lot of the text.

Also, Dale Stroud, a professional photographer, took a lot of great pictures of the Kodiak for us, and the folks at gi inc and Radiate Films work with our video team (including Aaron Libera and Regina Sullivan) to make the short film FLIGHT about the Kodiak.

We also wanted to present updates, give people the opportunity to sign up for a newsletter, and provide an opportunity to give.

I decided to try a “tabbed” approach to the layout, and found a tool that allowed me to do that fairly easily in a way that will work with a variety of Internet browsers, including Firefox and Internet Explorer.

(For those of you who know about web-stuff, it’s an AJAX solution, AJAX just being a fancy new name for integrating Javascript and CSS to manipulate presentation and create a dynamic web page. For the rest of you, it’s … um … magic.)

I used a lot of Patrick’s text and some of Andy’s website programming, and our photo editor, Steve Lawrence, touched up, cropped and resized some of Dale’s photos.

Then our content manager, David Abbott, looked it over before it went “live” – available to the public.

All that took about two weeks from start to finish, with me devoting between two and six hours to it each day, along with what others were doing. (Yes, I did other stuff in the other time. Sheesh, mom.)

The result is Special Report: The Kodiak >>

But wait a second. What’s that have to do with planting churches among unreached tribal people? Lots.

First, you can see part of the teamwork that is central to the way New Tribes Mission operates. Everyone in NTM is part of a team that works together toward one goal: planting churches among unreached tribal people.

And as part of our team, you’re part of the NTM team as well.

Second, if you read the report (or watch the film), you’ll see the importance of missionary aviation.

For missionaries in remote locations, missionary aviation is vital. The Kodiak is vital to missionary aviation. And this special report is a key component to giving people opportunities to take part in the work God is doing among tribal people, by helping provide for the Kodiaks.

Thank you for helping to provide for our ministry, and for praying. Your role in our ministry is helping missionaries worldwide, who are planting churches among unreached tribes, to the glory of God.