An evening filmed on a hill in the Golan, played in your own room on any night you choose. No cost, and nothing to sell.
Any season · your screen, your night
Ask for an eveningThis week a retired priest on the coast of Maine wrote to me. He said he would like to gather clergy colleagues across a wide span, and their congregations with them, the ones who have already walked this land and the ones who only long to, and he asked whether I would come and speak to them from here.
I said yes before I had finished reading it. Then I realised he had described something I should simply offer to everyone.
So here it is, plainly. If you lead a congregation anywhere in the world, I will give you an evening from the Golan Heights, filmed on the land, for nothing. You play it on your own screen on the night that suits you. There is no clock on it and no time zone to work around.
Where the light allows it, I take the camera out onto the land rather than sitting at a desk in front of a bookshelf. You get the hill, the wind, the season your people are reading about, and a farmer who was working that ground an hour earlier.
Not a survey of the whole country. One text, opened from the place it happened, with the geography, the distances and the season that the writer assumed you already knew and that no study Bible ever tells you.
Including the hard things. What it is like to live here now, what two years of war did to this hillside, whether it is safe, whether it is worth coming. Collect their questions on the night and send them to me. I answer every one in writing, honestly rather than usefully, and you read the answers to your people the following week.
The Golan from the ground. What this basalt is, what grows on it, why the Bible keeps coming back to this corner, and what is in the frame behind me while I talk.
You choose it, or I bring one. Caesarea Philippi and the gates of hell. The real distances around the Sea of Galilee and what they do to the gospel accounts. Bashan and Og and the cities of refuge. Gamla under siege, and what that town says about the world Luke was writing into. Or tell me the series you are preaching and I will take your people to the ground it stands on.
Collect them on the night and send them to me. I answer every one, and you read the answers out the following week. This is usually the part people remember, and it is the part I enjoy most.
At the very end of the film I say that if this ever becomes a journey, I would be glad to walk it with them, and where to find me. One sentence. I will not preach at your people, I will not ask them for money, and I will never ask you for their email addresses.
Caesarea Philippi and Matthew 16, filmed under the cliff Jesus was standing beneath when he said the gates of hell would not prevail.
The city wall where Saul's body hung, and what the Land did with that darkness.
The town under siege in the year 67, and what it says about the world Luke was writing into.
Leviticus 25, opened from a farm that keeps the sabbath year.
Play any of these on your own screen tonight. Or write below and I will prepare an evening around the passage you are preaching.
Timing: it takes me a few days to prepare an evening for you, so write a week or two before the night you have in mind. If you need it sooner, ask. One of the evenings already filmed may fit.
Because I would rather tell you the truth than pretend this is pure gift.
I am a licensed guide. Guiding is how I feed my children, and two years of war emptied this country of the people I used to walk with. I could charge a fee for an evening like this and speak to two churches. Free, I can speak to thirty. Somewhere in those thirty rooms are a handful of people who will one day stand on the Mount of Beatitudes for real, and when that day comes I would like them to remember who showed them the hill first.
That is all of it, and now you know as much about my reasoning as I do. In the meantime your people get a real evening in the land, and you get something you did not have to plan, at no cost and no risk. If nobody ever books a trip, I will still have spent an evening telling people about a place I love, which is not a bad way to spend one.
Tell me your room and your date. I answer every one of these personally, usually the same day.
Coming to the land yourself, with family or a few friends? Ask for a written plan before you book anything: one hour with me, $150, credited in full against your guiding days.