Christadelphian Video 2023 Year In Review
July 20, 2023, saw the eleven-year anniversary of the YouTube site and the inception date of “Christadelphianvideo.org”.
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Through God’s grace, in 2023, we provided abundant Scriptural material from across the globe on Christadelphian Video. This material has ranged from “Thought for the Day” videos and daily comments on the daily readings from our WhatsApp group, Bible School and Prophecy Day videos, Gospel videos, Bible classes, and Fraternal videos.
This year, we have seen a much larger uptake of shorts/reels since creating our dedicated team headed by Sis. Stef Foley. We have also continued to support ecclesias and other online organizations with their online streaming events.
This year has seen us source, download, produce, review, provide artwork for, and upload over a staggering 2,407 videos. A substantial increase (32%) over last year. We’ve been more selective this period while producing audio-only versions of each video for our popular podcast Bible.Truth.Feed and Christadelphian Talks.
During 2023, we rebranded our “BibleTruthandProphecy” profile to “The Bible Channel—Discover the Bible.” This name reflects the content we regularly upload more accurately. We are grateful to all the teams involved with this effort in 2023.
We have not made any progress with our new “Discover the Bible” site yet, but we hope to create something this year, God Willing. if you would like to be involved, please let us know.
Bro. Matt Eggington, our webmaster, has now completed our audio-only site, www.scripturescribe.com, and regularly uploads from his archive material collected over the years, as well as new material converted from video files on our video site. He will continue fine-tuning our Christadelphianvideo.org site while developing our new preaching arm.
The idea behind these changes is to have a resource for the brotherhood and another area for our work with the public. We hope to include collaborations with other sites that can help with the follow-up of contacts (e.g., TIYB correspondence courses).
We must thank our review and graphics design teams for their outstanding work in providing reviews and graphics for over 2,400 videos during this period. Sis. Beulah Edwards has seen her team grow this year to over thirty brothers and sisters, which has helped to keep the steady stream of new material flowing.
Our graphic designers have been using the exciting emergence of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to create images, and I am sure this resource will be advanced through the coming year.
Our social media presence has grown consistently since 2021 despite our main Instagram account being shut down twice in 2021. It is now renamed www.instagram.com/christadelphian.video. Our preaching Facebook “Bible School” page www.facebook.com/OpenBibles, has proved very popular over the year, now realizing 4,500 followers (+200 over last year).
some recording have been watched thousands of times
Our events team has been holding two live streams each week on this page via Zoom (Sundays @ 2.30 GMT and Thursdays @ 6.30 GMT). These live streams have been well received, with some being watched thousands of times.
In addition, our live events onsite team leader, Bro. Luke Brown, along with the help of Bro. Matthew Pearce and Pete Barrett have recorded many events, including the Northern, Rugby, and Young People’s Prophecy Days, as well as the Swanwick Bible School and other live events.
We acknowledge the great effort that goes into preparing and recording these events, and the benefit to the community and beyond of having these recordings is invaluable.
We have received donations during 2023 (christadelphianvideo.org/donate) and have funds available to carry out essential work on our network, changing servers and investing in software to ensure the site works much more efficiently than previously. Funds have also been used to promote some carefully selected video material on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
Our main Twitter (now “X”) account twitter.com/Christadelph has 1,384 organic followers, the same as last year. We have purchased the “Blue tick” to verify our presence and may well start uploading videos to Twitter for greater exposure on that platform.
We have struggled to upload much content to our podcasts this year due to lack of time, but we have achieved 2.1 million plays and have gained 466 followers on Spotify at anchor.fm/christadelphians-talk.
Every year, we are thankful to the ecclesias that record and make available their studies, Gospel addresses, fraternals, etc., so we can add them to our network for the benefit of all.
Graphics Team
Sis. Gail Williams has done an awesome job coordinating her team this first year. Each day, she provides images for our very popular “Thought” posts based on the readings. She has also identified areas where we could improve our output and communication, avoiding unnecessary work. We are now funding a team Canva account and a subscription to AI image software. I am constantly thrilled by the variety of designs and the imagination used to create such engaging designs by Sis. Gail’s team.
Latest Project
In the last year, we welcomed Sis. Stef Foley to our team as team leader/coordinator. Her team concentrated on producing YouTube shorts for upload to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. These are very popular platforms for these formats, and it is a wonderful opportunity for us to get God’s Word to the masses and introduce them to our network.
This year, we created 56 shorts/reels—18 of which we promoted with varying degrees of success. Our most watched short was “The Divine Plan: Jesus, Unexpected King Of The Jews,” which has had 9,660 views to date. Sis Gail has also been producing some independent shorts created from scratch, and these, too, are great for introducing those interested to the material we offer.
We worked closely with Bre. Frank Abel and Ron Cowie extensively last year to produce many video series specifically for our network and with our audience in mind. We thank them for contributing to this very valuable project and hope to continue preserving and presenting material this coming year with some projects already underway.
In addition to the above, we are now pleased to host a new quarterly publication we both sponsor and endorse—The publication produced by Bro. Nigel Bernard (one of our designers) utilizes the services of various ecclesial members and is called “Compare and Expound.” Four editions have been released so far, and you can find them at https://christadelphianvideo.org/document/compare-expound/
Upcoming Events
Sis. Rachael Wadsworth has kindly agreed to manage the Upcoming Events section on our website. We hope this area will grow to be a useful aid for our community as we seek to encourage brothers and sisters to engage with more online and in-person events held throughout the world of Christadelphia. She has long been keen to involve herself in a project like this.
We pray God will continue to use our efforts in His service to bring more people to His saving Grace so that He may be glorified. It is highly possible many individuals have been assisted in their understanding of God’s truth via a network that we are unaware of. Certainly, the comments received daily on our YouTube main channel would indicate this.
New Functionality
Sis. Joanna Evans has taken on the role of creating chapter breaks for the majority of all our newly uploaded videos. This update is a rewarding and valuable task to assist viewers of the material find key points within a video, but it is also very time-consuming. She has dedicated herself to this over the last year and has become a very valued member of our network. We thank her for her unwavering dedication to the task.
2024 Plans (God Willing)
We hope to have further collaborations with other online organizations and presenters from within our community.
As our presence grows, we commission more speakers to produce bespoke material specifically for our network, calling on our eleven years of experience and understanding of what works best to attract more to the word of God.
We have also been blessed to receive the services of Bro. Dan Langston, a new videographer, who has been producing the “Bible in the News” consistently each week. These products have always been popular.
In 2024, we hope to continue to support the brotherhood with live events, streaming, and subsequent video editing and hosting.
The year ahead will provide us with many challenges, personally and collectively, I am sure, but it will also allow us to reach out to those seeking God’s truth and support our community with sound Bible preaching and study material.
If any brother or sister would like to volunteer within the network in any capacity, please email christadelphianvideo@gmail.com
Art Courtonel,
Rugby Ecclesia, UK
ChristadelphianVideo.com