Brief history of Frontiers Media
1994/1995In 1994/1995 when RF returned from helping develop a missions information sharing system in the USA he felt called to help with Church Planting among Muslims by using Media. He had a background in media, starting working life with the BBC and later being TV director for a small mission group in the UK producing materials for use in the UK, Poland and Nigeria.
RF was working with Frontiers at the time and although they have a heart for Church Planting among Muslims, the media aspect was not central to their calling and Greg Livingstone [founder and then International Director of Frontiers] encouraged him to find another mission agency to use to produce materials appropriate to reaching Muslims with the Gospel. In 1996, RF travelled with Greg to Lebanon and Greg introduced him to many of the mission leaders in the Middle East.
1997
In 1997 RF was seconded to another agency, still with the vision of making materials to reach and disciple people from a Muslim background in the Middle East. During the next two years 'Discovery' was produced. Discovery is a primary evangelism course for Muslims. However, although this was produced and the secondment helpful in developing relationships around the Middle East, there was still a growing calling within RF to be part of a mission that was exclusively trying to reach Muslims with the Gospel through media.
1999
In 1999, Rick Love [the new International Director of Frontiers] gave permission for RF to set up a new agency called Frontiers Media [the permission was to use the Frontiers name] and the British office of Frontiers continued to support the activities of what RF hoped would become a team in Cyprus reaching out to Muslims in the Middle East.
BH, who was on the board of British Frontiers, became one of the founding board members of Frontiers Media as a bridge between Frontiers and the new organisation.
Around that time, JG, who was a Frontiers Team Leader in Tunisia felt a calling to be more involved with media for church planting. He had found that developing media teams actually aided the church planting process, in that it helped motivate people to become involved in a small team project which was the embryonic church in that area. JG and his family moved to Malta and Frontiers Media had its second 'team' focussing on North Africa. Frontiers Canada would continue to support JG and the team in Malta.
JG and RF, with guidance and help from BH, worked out the constitution for Frontiers Media and honed the vision. Frontiers Media would be an association of autonomous teams working in or near Muslim countries, with 'support groups' in western countries to deal with publicity, fund-raising and all the legal aspects of charitable activities. These support groups would also act as an accountability layer to ensure funds were handled correctly.
2000/2001
In 2000 the Middle East team of Frontiers Media leased its first two Internet servers, providing secure email for themselves and one other mission agency plus web site resources. This included arabmultimedia.com which was the first e-commerce site handling Arabic Christian media. The software was written by RF, encouraged to do so by Frontiers Team Leaders in the Middle East who saw this as an important tool to making books, videos and audio CDs available for outreach. Not only was arabmultimedia.com the first e-commerce site, but it was also bi-lingual arabic/english. Indeed it was this bi-lingual aspect, where the arabic was right-to-left and the english left-to-right that had made it necessary to write the software as there was no bi-lingual e-commerce software available.
2003
In 2003 the charitable trust in the UK behind Frontiers Media was legally registered as 'The TLA Charitable Trust' and a board of trustees appointed with BH as its first chairman.
2004
In 2003/2004 RF had the vision for using the Internet as a delivery mechanism for radio: 'Internet Radio' as it is now called. With help from Arab Christians RF built a studio in Cyprus and a studio in Egypt and JG built a studio in Malta. In partnership with HCJB, IBRA and LH Media, three Internet radio stations were launched. Each had a distinctive feel: Music radio, talk radio and a youth/interactive radio. The youth radio was a partnership between LH Media in Egypt and Frontiers Media in Cyprus. The aim was to have a youth sound, closer to secular radio than the preaching radio that was common among Christian stations.
The Malta studio was producing a live weekly programme which was being linked to a broadcast centre in Spain and from there on both satellite radio and to one of the internet streams. The Egypt studio was broadcasting a live nightly programme for 'Here and Now' and the studio in Cyprus acting as the switching hub for that and Radio Ibrahim.
In order for all this to work Frontiers Media had to develop scheduling software to schedule the programmes and what is called 'play- out' systems to play the programmes out to the Internet. This scheduling and play- out system was developed in partnership with Jesus Today group in Egypt and RF helped them build a music recording and broadcast studio in their centre so that they could develop their own radio stream, although their target audience was with young people from a Christian background. Frontiers Media Middle East also leased a third much more powerful server to deal with all the radio streams.
In 2004 Frontiers Media Middle East was asked to handle a web site that was developed by Muslim Background Believers for Muslims. This was to be a bridge-building site, to develop relationships and find people who wanted to know more about Jesus. The site was hosted by Frontiers Media on their London server, written by authors all round the Middle East and North Africa and the software written by a Japanese American living in the USA!
Along the way Frontiers Media had collected other sites reaching out to Muslims and there were now approx 15-20 web-sites and more than 100 secure email accounts, and five radio streams being maintained.
In the summer of 2004 PR joined the Frontiers Media team in Cyprus to co-lead that team [still looking for more people] with RF. PR brought much needed technical expertise and having just spent two years running Discipleship Training Courses for YWAM, valuable insights into discipleship materials.
2005
In 2005 Frontiers Media Middle East was asked to help the Pray for Egypt event with a live stream from their conference to enable people all around the world to pray, and so the team developed a portable video streaming system that could be flown to a location and a video stream from the live event bounced to their server in London.
Over the four days of the event tens of thousands of people all around the world 'tuned in' on video or audio to pray for Egypt through this feed.
Pentecost that year also saw the first ever Christian live Outside Broadcast from a Muslim country on satellite TV for the Global Day of Prayer. RF acted as the consultant to this, and was the only person on the team who had ever done live TV before. As one can imagine the programmes were stressful, but did result in two stations: God TV and SAT7 [plus others outside the Middle East/North Africa region] having live programmes from the event.
In the autumn of 2005, Frontiers Media was asked to help totally redesign the site being written by Muslim Background Believers (MBBs), making it much more professional and more interactive. This was the start of a partnership with e-Bridge, which has become a core partner with that team.
2006
In 2006 Frontiers Media Middle East also assisted with the Pray for Egypt Conference and the Global Day of Prayer. The Global Day of Prayer absorbed a large amount of effort and was not particularly successful and so started the team on evaluating where they were putting their effort.
Audiences were small for the Internet radio, but people were responding and many finding these stations to be a refuge where they could share and hear the Good News that God loved them so much he sent His son to die for them. The MBB site started using Google advertising and a significant increase in the audience was seen [the first quarter of 2006 had 190,000 visitors to the site]. So in spring 2006 Frontiers Media hosted an experiment to do two weeks of live, interactive broadcasting, backed with Google advertising from their studio in Cyprus for Radio Ibrahim. This resulted in a huge increase in audience to approx 2000 listeners per day by the end of the experiment.
This convinced IBRA that they should develop their own live studio and broadcast Radio Ibrahim from their centre in Cyprus, so in the spring of 2007 they took over the programme origination and scheduling and Frontiers Media handled the streaming.
Between 2005 and the end of 2006 Frontiers Media North Africa built and equipped a small TV studio in the basement to the new offices that they had to excavate before starting building and early in 2007 shot a series of talk shows, written and produced by Muslim Background Believers from North Africa, which will be broadcast on a number of Christian satellite TV stations.
2007
2007 has been a time of review for both Frontiers Media teams. It is easy to be dragged into activities that are not central to reaching and discipling Muslims, so some activities will be cut, some partnerships dissolved and some new ones forged. Central to everything is an over-whelming desire to be focussed on reaching and discipling Muslims. By 2007 there were approx 30 web-sites and about 300 secure email accounts. Frontiers Media is helping with reaching Muslims from Morocco through Saudi Arabia to the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan and out east to Indonesia.