The Sound of Music, Lesa’s 9th show at our school, and the first one featuring Sydney in a major role, finished 2 weeks ago. See photos from the show and read more about the 11 weeks of rehearsal, 85 cast, crew, and orchestra, 5 sellout performances, and 1 drama teacher to rule them all.

Tonight, Andy heads to Egypt and on Monday, Iraq. He will be serving as a videographer with International Christian Concern, an organization whose mandate is getting the world to notice Christian persecution and to fight on behalf of those who are enduring this persecution. Read more about this trip, and how you can be praying for Andy, and especially for the christians from these countries.

2 days after he returns, Andy starts casting for “A Distant Boat”(working title), the first feature-length film his team has ever taken on, and with Andy as director. Andy’s team will weed through up to 400 actors in 2 days to get down to a cast of about a dozen. Watch a short video about this film project and how you can get involved.

A little under two weeks later, and the whole family will be in Amsterdam, riding the canals and checking out the Anne Franke house, on a short 1-day layover on the way to the US for furlough this summer.

Browns in Africa, Summer 2012 world tour dates:

We don’t take it lightly that there are nearly 100 people in the US and Canada who sacrifice financially, regularly, for us to serve the church in Africa, and even the church in the middle east occasionally. We are humbled and blown away every month to see who God will use to provide the $6600 it takes every month for us to live modestly and serve effectively here.

As we’ll be starting our 3rd term as missionaries in August, we are forecasting a $27,000 shortfall in our support over the next 2 year term, due to inflation and the rapidly rising cost of living here.

• Would you please be praying about joining our support team, either financially or in praying for us? 
• If you belong to a church that values missions, would you consider letting us be a part of your church’s plan to fulfill the great commission in Africa?
• Would you please be praying for our furlough? That we would find much-needed rest in a short amount of time, especially with great distances to be traveled and quality family time that needs to be spent.

Thank you for taking the time to read our update, and to pray for our family and our ministries here in Africa.

-Andy, Lesa, Robbie, Avery and Sydney Brown

Tana films a scene with our young actor, Madagascar

OFM is pretty good at making documentaries. Over the past 5 years we’ve made documentaries in a dozen African countries, bringing light to unreached people groups and bringing prayer and support to ministries.

Most of the media we produce is for a western audience, the church largely. Connecting the church around the world with what God is doing in Africa.

But a few months ago we were presented with an opportunity to do something totally different. Something almost crazy. Something so far outside our comfort zone, on a scale so large, that God had to be behind it.

The challenge was presented to us to create a film that would “bend the heart of the African church to missions.” The church in Africa is big. It’s strong in many ways. But it has traditionally been lacking in mission vision, in seeing its role in finishing the task of the great commission among Africa’s 900 unreached people groups.

As our team brainstormed how to do this, we realized we needed to do it through the form of a drama. Presenting information only goes so far, and in Africa, particularly, story-telling is the primary form of communicating values and mores.

And as we discussed what this drama would look like, we realized that a 20-minute short film wouldn’t have much effect or opportunity to spread. A truly African story, for an african audience, told in an entertaining and dramatic way, that could end up in every church in subsaharan Africa or satellite TV, or theatres. This would have to be feature length.

Our writer sequestered himself away, and with an outline of ideas by the team, cranked out a 90 page screenplay in a couple months. We started looking at Kenyan screenwriters to partner with to flavour and rewrite parts of the script with authentic dialog and characters. We started looking at actors, directors, cinematographers, and studying films being produced from Kenya and the rest of the continent.

Now we’re in the process of raising money. Lots of it, but not as much as the higher-end Kenyan films, since our salaries are already covered as we are support-raising missionaries first. And we’re hoping to find actors and crew that are Christians, believe in the value and purpose of this film and willing to not try to retire early from this film. About $125,000 is what we need.

Right now I’m in the process of casting, which I hope will take place in the few weeks between my Iraq trip and our furlough starting June 2. After we return in Kenya at the beginning of August, and assuming we’ve raised the necessary funds, I’ll jump into the end of pre-production and start directing. We’re slated for production during September, October, and part of November.

Exciting! And a little intimidating, as a director who’s never directed anything. But at least I’m married to a director…

See more about the film project here, and how you can get involved.

We Christians in Iraq feel that we have been left behind, and that we have nothing… from the day the US military left, Christians felt themselves in total disarray. Violence related to religious sectarianism increased. Our people have been slaughtered, massacred, and murdered, and we have nowhere to turn.”

A friend of mine works for International Christian Concern (persecution.org) and has worked on behalf of persecuted Christians in Afghanistan and Egypt and throughout the middle east.

He’s asked me to accompany him on a trip next month to Iraq, as a videographer, to tell the stories of these believers, and why nearly 2/3 of Iraq’s Christians have fled the country since the war on terror. I’ve been asked to produce videos that will end up being used for advocacy in congressional offices and for the ICC organization.

While not part of my official duties with Africa Inland Mission, I feel these are important stories to be told. The same kind of stories I feel called to tell from Africa. Just not in Africa this time.

Canon Andrew White is working to secure my visas, and the date of the trip is rapidly approaching. In the meantime, I’m looking for donations for my expenses during this trip, which will probably be less than $2000.

If you’d like to be part of helping bring awareness through video of the plight of the Iraqi church, please contact me. And please be praying for my visa to come through in time for this trip.

After 3 months of post-production, I finally finished “Bound to the Past”, our short film from Madagascar, based on the true stories of 2 of Madagascar’s least reach people groups.

Read more about this trip, the craziest OFM trip ever, here.

Madagascar is amazing, there is no place like it in the world. It’s nicknamed “the 8th continent”, and for good reason… it’s not like Africa! There are no indigenous lions, giraffe, elephants, or anything predatory. In fact 80% of the wildlife and plant species here are ONLY found here! 99 species of lemurs, 6 of the 8 species of giant baobab, giant chameleons. Even the people are different: austronesian descent, rice farmers, houses elevated off the ground. Even their language is different. The whole trip was more like a scene out of Survivor: Borneo than Survivor: Africa.

Our mission was to produce a documentary about 2 people groups, the Sakalava and the Antakarana, who are among the least reached in Madagascar. Both groups are steeped in ancestor worship and possession, and we studied much about the great spiritual darkness and oppression of this place before we set foot there.

The Sakalava are well known for their possession ceremonies, where the spirits of their royal ancestors literally and physically possess the people they have chosen as mediums. And possession by those spirits would be considered the good kind of possession. There are much darker spirits that are seeking people to possess as well.

The Antakarana have a strong tie to their ancestors as well. 200 years ago there were 18 kings of Madagascar, and the Merina king decided he wanted to be king over all. He sought to rule the other tribes, and he pursued the Antakarana to near extinction. For over a year the people hid in massive caves in the coastal cliffs until one day their secret location was betrayed. Forced to flee to a neighboring island, the king of the Antakarana made a vow that if he and his people made it safely across the ocean to this island, then he and his people would follow the religion of the prophet (Muhammed) forever. Today that vow is still honored, on a superficial level at least.

Our time with the Sakalava was highlighted by an overnight stay in a coastal village, where we slept in their beds and ate fish and rice with them and entertained ourselves with singing and clapping under a magnificent starlit sky.

Then we headed, via boat and bus, to the mainland capital of the Antakarana, to see their caves and meet their king and collect the necessary permission to visit their sacred island, the cultural heart of the people. The caves were immense and bat-filled, and I was struck by the great difficulty it would take for a community to live inside of them for a year. I also ate some bat for lunch, a local delicacy, which tasted not a little like a greasy tire.

With permission granted to visit their sacred island, we headed back across the open ocean in a tiny speedboat. It was just the 3 of us, AIM’s unit leader for Madagascar, the boat captain, a cook, a translator, and some food.

It was the most “David Livingstone” experience of my life. Heading to a tiny island that our mission organization has never set eyes on in its 110 year history, and quite possibly no mission organization has ever set eyes on. Meeting people who are so cut off from the other islands that they’ve met very few, if any, foreigners.

But the people there were kind enough, and especially the “prince” of the island, to let us stay in a simple banda on the most beautiful stretch of beach I have ever seen. Turquoise blue sea, powder soft sand. Anywhere else in the world and this beach would be full of high dollar hotels or beachfront homes. But here we were, with a beautiful beach to ourselves and surrounded by small villages of 20 to 50 people each.

Contrasting with the beautiful scenery was the spiritual darkness of a place that has never heard the name of Jesus. And contrasting with the beautiful scenery was a growing pain in my throat that was making it increasingly more and more difficult to eat or drink anything. By the end of our trip I was sure I had a fishbone stuck in my throat, and tried all their local remedies: spoonfuls of honey, swallowing rice balls whole. Nothing helped, and each day it got worse. If I wasn’t so far from a hospital, or any kind of health clinic, I would have found a way to get there.

By the time we had to leave this island, a wind had kicked up and the seas grew choppy. We had a 3 hour boat ride ahead of us, and a flight to catch later that day, so we had to press on, even though our boat was not large enough to be able to handle the waves very well. Minutes into the ride we were soaked and shivering. We’d crest one wave and come crashing down in the trough and get splashed over the sides by the next wave. We just prayed our camera gear stayed dry, and we had wrapped them in garbage bags in preparation.

About an hour into this, OFM’s short-termer videographer, Tana, who was sitting across the boat from me, gasped and pointed behind me. I spun around in time to see the fin of a whale, much larger than our ship, smack the water and disappear beneath the waves. This was only about 20 feet from where I was sitting. A couple seconds later the whale appeared just behind our boat, surfacing just briefly and then slipping into the choppy waves.

If only we’d had a camera out at the time!

We eventually dried out and warmed up, made our flight back to the mainland, and crashed in a hotel that night. As soon as I got within cell phone range I called a GI doctor in Kenya to see me as soon as possible. That night in the hotel we realized how tired we were, and how little sleep we’d been getting over the past 12 days. Up at sunrise (5am), walk all day in the sun, bucket showers, mosquitos, and not very restful nights in bed, between the cockroaches the size of mice and the rats the size of small dogs that seemed to be quite comfortable cohabiting with us. The unit leader woke up the last morning with a wound on his finger from a rat bite!

I got back to Kenya the day before Robbie’s 13th birthday, and not a moment too soon. If our trip would have been 1 day longer I would have had to seek emergency medical attention in Antananarivo, the capital city. I had been planning on a 4-day, father-son climb of Mt Kenya that weekend, but had to cancel it because I was too exhausted and weak from the trip and from not eating or drinking much over the previous 4 days.

The next day, Robbie’s birthday, I found myself getting a chest x-ray to rule out a fishbone in the throat, and a scheduled endoscopy. The culprit: not a fishbone, not a bat bone, but the pills I’d been taking to prevent malaria. A pill had dissolved in my throat and given me an ulcer, which was probably made much worse by the local fishbone remedies, and by continuing to take those pills. Once I stopped that, everything cleared up and today, a week later, my throat feels fine. Praise God!

All in all, we’re calling it the most extreme OFM trip ever, from the variety of wildlife to the variety of modes of transportation to the David Livingstone moments. I’m so privileged to have gotten to lead the OFM team there, and to be producing this documentary so the Church will know these people and how to love them like Jesus does.

And I still owe Robbie that trip to Mt Kenya…

Read OFM teammate Mike Delorenzo’s blog post on the trip. It’s much better written than mine!

See more photos from the trip

So, I’ll be assisting at the film screenings in a technical capacity. But more than that, I’ll have the opportunity to meet other indie filmmakers and share stories and ideas and inspiration. I’ll also be leading worship at DCC that weekend and speaking in the service. And who knows… maybe even showing that secret film I can’t talk about publicly…

I’ll be in Northern Virginia from November 1 to 12, and would love to see everyone who lives in the area. Please email me so we can find a time to get together!

Working hard... on what?

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on a film that I can talk about publicly. Here we are, the last quarter of 2011, and the only thing I can show for the past 10 months is “Build Something Beautiful“, which I shot at the beginning of 2011 in Uganda.

I’ve been busy, though. Crazy busy, producing the largest documentary OFM has done to date, which took me to countries where you have to have armed escorts, where the penalty for becoming a Christian is the most severe in the world, and where we told the story of someone who became a Christian from that community.

Talk about an armed escort!

To tell you any more about this story would endanger the person whose testimony we documented, and possibly ourselves. You’ve probably seen Kenya in the news quite a bit lately and can understand how expatriates, like ourselves and our team, have to take some reasonable precautions because Kenya is not immune or safe from these kinds of things.

I hope you’ll get a chance to see what I’ve been working on for the past 6 months, and if you email me directly I’ll send you a link, so long as you don’t repost anywhere that I was involved in this production.

Please be praying for this unnamed film, which has great potential to effect an entire generation, only through God’s help and sovereign plan of course. It’s a story that has never been told in film format, about a people group that no-one can talk publicly about, and we took seriously our responsibility to tell this story, recognizing we were uniquely positioned and placed here to do so! No-one else in the world would have the opportunity we had to produce a film like this. May God’s kingdom be established among this people forever!

A video about how AIM’s health ministries impact the kingdom of God. The OFM team have been working on this video for almost 3 years now, with footage on here spanning the continent and the past 3 years. Most recently, I shot the Lake Victoria island sequences a couple weeks ago, and scored the beginning/ending of this video. My good buddy and OFM teammate, Mike Saum, wrote and produced, Ted did most of the editing and directing.

About a year ago I traveled to Korr and Kurungu, Northern Kenya, to produce a film about the nomadic peoples of northern Kenya. When Ted returned from the US in May, he picked up this project which had been sitting on my desk waiting to be edited. I am so glad to see this project completed, finally, and am excited to see what God will do through this video to raise up prayer and mission support for the unique challenges of ministering to nomadic tribes. Korr remains one of my favorite places in Africa, and we are privileged to partner with the church and missionaries there frequently!