h

The Journey Begins

A program that delivers

PROGRAMMING a global magazine that delivers on its promise of inspring people to action, takes time, a team, prayer, patience—and prayer for patience—and a ton of research.

For the past few years, we’ve traveled through the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, visiting churches, speaking with pastors, meeting with missions boards, and interviewing missionaries.

We’ve created concepts, made mockups, delivered demos, presented at conferences, and gathered feedback.

Putting a magazine together is all about “the mix”—a confection and collection of stories that cover the interests of a diverse audience.

The nine stories you see in this pilot publication foreshadow nine sections in a forthcoming mobile magazine. With five stories in each section, harvest will deliver a rich cross-section of activity in the global mission fields.

Because there’s no such thing as an “edition” in an always-on world, in the expanded harvest magazine we’ll publish rolling updates to deliver real-time news, with longer reads or essays swapped out at longer intervals.

We also plan to make our articles available as a searchable archive.

Stories will cover day-to-day life on the front lines of the mission fields; incidents showing biblical lessons from the lives of missionaries and co-laborers; heartfelt moments that illustrate God’s leading in action; messages from preachers present and past; and surveys of fields, drawing on multiple data sources, and up-to-the-minute interviews.

Trends emerging so far include:

  • Islamists being converted in the west via migration, or through gospel messages and Bible studies beamed by satellite into their homes in the closed countries of the Middle East and Asia
  • Catholics coming to Christ in large numbers in Latin America and the Philippines
  • Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Christians thriving in China, as churches multiply underground
  • In African and Asian post-colonial mission fields, teaching missionaries are working to untangle doctrinal errors of works-for-salvation religions and cults
  • Entire people groups on the move worldwide as God brings the mission field to us—including Iranian Muslims and Latino Catholics

    • Beyond the pilot

    This pilot edition has been responsively designed for web and phone platforms, but the final magazine implementation will be platform-agnostic—and available, as a subscription app on all mobile devices, including tablets.

    We plan to produce a magazine app rather than to build on an open web platform, in order to ensure privacy for our missionaries, and security for our subscribers.

    This rendition of harvest can now be handed to specialist developers as a finished and polished product with “look-and-feel” defined, and ready for final build-out into a magazine available from Apple and Google app stores.

    Our goal is to win those who will win the lost, and to use the power of technology for good, and not for evil.

    You can help in prayer and financial support. Please contact us for more information.

    Editor Thomas Liddle presents a preview; and interviewer Linda Karkafi shares a moment of joy with Zambia missionary Pat Hamburg.