Spreading the ‘Good News:’ International Christian media and Prince Edward County

Burlington, Ont. may have Crossroads Christian Communications’ 100 Huntley Street, but Bloomfield has Wesley Acres at West Lake, a 250-acre island camp affiliated with the Free Methodist Church in Canada, with its own share of evangelical media heavy hitters either passing through as guest speakers or summering in tranquility here.

Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”

For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.

But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.

Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.