In July of 2015 I heard about a seminar that was going to be run at the University of the Nations Kona, Hawaii campus. The seminar was going to be about the Jesus Film and (so I was told) would be good for DTS school leaders to get an understanding of how the Jesus Film worked so we could teach our students.
The seminar happened in August of 2015. It started with an overview of what would be taught during the seminar. The information communicated was very different from what had been announced to the participants a few weeks earlier. What the YWAM organizers of the seminar communicated and the information being communicated by the Jesus Film staff were so different that some of the participants left the seminar after the second day.
That the Jesus Film staff were there for to train people to be the trainers of others was correct. 
However the training could not be just taught to a DTS student in a few hours. This training involved several phases of which the seminar was the first phase. There are 3 other phases to the training.
As we got more into the training both Sylvia and I realized that this was something that we could do long term and that we were the best positioned to take on the day to day leadership of the YWAM side of the partnership. Within a week of the seminar we were asked to lead a recording team to Papua New Guinea to record 8 languages.
Mid September we left for Papua New Guinea and the field training phase of our training. This was to be the first real out working of a new partnership between Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and Jesus Film Project. We would be in a remote village area and would need to build 2 studio's in order to record the 8 languages. We would be recording 2 languages each day in each studio, a total of 4 languages each week. At the end of this trip we had finished 8 languages and delivered to each of the languages groups a finished copy of the Jesus Film in their language.
In January of 2016 we went to Samoa to train the staff of the YWAM to do the same work that we did in September of last year. This was the first time that we were able to put training into action - teaching the staff of the base. This was definitely challenging and stretching for both of us. For me this was really the first time to prepare lessons and teach a class. The students were really good and easy to instruct. The topic was right up my alley which made it easier to teach the class.
In April we went to Papua New Guinea to prepare a number of languages for recording of the Jesus Film. This meant traveling to various different cities to meet with people from each language who would be involved in the translation of the Jesus Film into their languages. We were able to arrange for 12 languages to have the Jesus Film translated into their language. The translation work will happen in August of this year and hopefully the recording will take place in October of this year.
As I close off this blog we are in New Zealand visiting supporters, friends and family. We are scheduled to go to the Solomon Islands in June to continue the Jesus Film Partnership.