Mission over profit

The Bible has many paradoxes. ”The first shall be last.” “You must lose your life to gain it.” Or, as we saw last week in Kara Tippetts’ story, ”to die is to gain.”

In releasing Pilgrim’s Progress, Steve Cleary is doing the paradoxical compared to Hollywood standards. Not sinking money into studio animation, he equips his team to learn to do it themselves. Refusing to license the movie for profit, he asks those that want to show it, to sign off that it is not to make them money and that they will only use it for the mission field. Then, he translates it into their language. His goal being 100 languages.

Pilgrim’s Progress is set for release on Easter in the Philippines, Turkey and on Iran’s Christian Satellite TV (with millions of viewers and less than half of those are Christians). Steve is putting mission over profits. Hollywood theory is that you need twice as much money for marketing as you used in development. Steve is using half of his development budget for marketing. He is trusting God that word of mouth and social media promotion will launch Pilgrim’s Progress to the world.

As I see Steve taking God’s paradoxical view of life, the question I’m asking myself is how can I trust God like this?  Where are you seeing this at work in your life, or what do you see as changes you can make to trust God with a different view?