Concert picture from Croatian Campaign

Last night I asked Bob Johnson to take some pictures of the evening from his

seat directly behind me. Here's one that shows what the stage looked liked

and also includes my setup. To get the more technical details of what this

setup was, I posted a writeup on our other blog at

proclame.blogspot.com. You can see Marj on stage with the camera,

and the video monitor with another shot coming up, as well as the computer

with a visual of the earth that will be mixed in at some point. The group

on stage is ³Sax 4th Avenue², that Jim Jenkins leads.

 

Every night there are more people coming out; I think last night we had

about 200 or so. One of the missionaries here said that last night there

was the greatest number of non-church people. Several (non-christian)

teachers were invited, and one of them brought their whole class with them.

Afterwards they said how much they appreciated the evening.

 

Tonight there is a busload coming from another city so there should be even

more. Directly after the concert we (all the campaign participants) hang

around looking for someone to talk to and witness to, but so far I haven¹t

found anyone that a) speaks English or French enough to communicate and b)

isn¹t a church member or already a believer. Marj has had some significant

conversations though. Really the Croatian church and campaign members

should be (and I think are) taking the lead on this, but we all want to work

together as a team on this. A bit of sensitivity is required as well,

because you don¹t want to have several people gang up on one unsuspecting

person!

 

There were some ladies sitting behind us last night who really got into the

interview video. Marj has been spending hours editing each one of these, so

it¹s good to know there are effective. They have become a very important

part of the evening because they are quite funny, and this is really the

only ³light² point of the evening. Last night one of the ladies said

afterwards ³that video was the best part of the whole thing!²

 

One thing that is definitely different for me is being on the technical side

of this thing. Usually I¹m one of the people on stage, often leading the

group or presentation, so it¹s been a bit different to be sitting down in

the audience watching and flicking buttons and sliders instead. The video

stuff is also creative, but in a different way. I think it¹s less work too,

as you don¹t have to prepare and practise as much, and the energy level

required is not the same. Less stress too. The down side is that people

generally want to talk to the people they saw on stage afterwards, not the

people they didn¹t see that were sitting in the dark doing mysterious things

seemingly unrelated to the concert. So it¹s a bit harder to talk to people.

 

The good thing for me is that I can still do both. I get tired doing too

much music stuff too, so it¹s nice to have other avenues to use for creative

outreach.

 

Overall we are very encouraged by everything EXCEPT the weather. It¹s been

cold, cloudy and rainy all this week, which isn¹t as conducive to getting

people to come out to an event. We¹ve been doing outside events as well,

talking to people and inviting them to the evenings, which doesn¹t work as

well when it¹s cold. Croatia is usually warm and sunny, so this is really

strange. It¹s supposed to get warmer tomorrow, and hopefully the second

week will be better.

 

Well, time to get going on preparations for tonight. Marj has already well

into editing the video for tonight, and I¹ll send this and go help as well.

 

Russ

Done