Jeff Nichols 0:10
Welcome to Fellowship One:Seven, a podcast from Child Evangelism Fellowship for the Christian community. On this podcast, we discuss various biblical topics, passages and truths through interviews and interactions with those making a difference in the lives of people around the world. I’m your host. Jeff Nichols, Vice President of USA Ministries for Child Evangelism Fellowship. Today, we’ll be sitting down with two extremely talented individuals from our own CEF International Headquarters. Andrew York is the Director of Digital Ministries for CEF, and Philip Neves is the Animations Manager of our Creative Services here at headquarters, we’ll learn about Digital Ministries of CEF and how these teams collaborate to unite kids with the gospel through technology. And friend Philip, we’re glad that you’re here.

Andrew York 1:01
Thanks for having us.

Jeff Nichols 1:02
Good. Hey, we’re glad that you’re here, because there has been a lot of stir about U-Nite and the U-Nite outs, and all that U-Nite has been doing to reach kids, literally around the world, it’s really blown up, hasn’t it?

Andrew York 1:16
Yeah, it’s amazing what God’s doing through these platforms.

Jeff Nichols 1:20
And today we have the two ministry leaders that have had the most to do with these things that have been going on. Andrew has been the visionary, the man with the plan. Andrew, you had a vision for what this could be way back, right?

Andrew York 1:34
Yes. I mean, God’s just laid it on my heart over the years to seek how we could be using technology to reach kids with the gospel right where they’re at. And in the last couple years, we’ve really seen how God’s opened the doors for that, and the opportunities that he’s kind of laid at our feet, and the things that we get to steward for him.

Jeff Nichols 1:53
And you have some really talented people around you. All around you, right?

Andrew York 1:56
Yes, very talented people. Philip here is a great team member, and we get to work really closely together.

Philip Neves 2:03
Well, JD and Clayton have all the talent. I just make spreadsheets.

Jeff Nichols 2:06
Make the spreadsheets, yeah, I think you do more than that. We haven’t always had an animation department here at CEF headquarters. How did that get started? Because, you know, back in the day, people remember the CEF backyard Bible clubs and blue haired ladies, you know, teaching with flannel grouse and flashcards and everything like, how did we get to where we are today with all this digital content?

Philip Neves 2:30
Well, CEF it’s actually had a studio for a while. I think we had a TV show at one point called the tree house club. So I started here about 10 years ago. People had left, but we were trying to rebuild. We were trying to move from film and tape to digital. And we were mostly doing promos that at that time, not many videos for kids, just like a song video here and there, mostly demos to teach teachers how to teach, and promotional videos to show the ministry. But then COVID happened, and all of our face to face ministry shut down, and a lot of our teacher training shut down, not all of it, but there was suddenly this demand for videos for kids, so we kind of became a TV studio again. We started taking our Good News Club® curriculum and making Good News Club TV™ and publishing that online.

Jeff Nichols 3:21
That is amazing. I can imagine there were some really long nights in those studios, right, Philip?

Philip Neves 3:27
Oh yeah, long nights, long days. We had a good team, though God helped us.

Jeff Nichols 3:30
That is amazing. So CEF, moved into digital at that time. Andrew, what did you see happening at the time in the not just in our space, but the digital space overall.

Andrew York 3:42
Yeah, well, I mean, there’s a lot of things that happened as a result of COVID that weren’t good. Many people lost lives and family members, and you know, that was a sad time for a lot of people, but there were still things that God was doing through that. One of those core things, which Philip touched on, was teaching CEF that while we were an in person ministry, and we continue to do that today, that’s one of our strongest ministries, we could also meet kids online. And there were a lot of children at that time that were transitioning their school to online. They were spending a lot more time at home, indoors, and needed to fill their day with things to do, and so we saw a lot of activity online from kids, and we were able to capitalize on that because of our team in creative and the vision of our leaders at the time to try and meet kids online. So, U-Nite, the platforms that we have really allowed for that explosion to happen, and we just saw God blessing CEF through that our teachers really wanted to keep connected with their kids as well that they were having in their programs and in their clubs, and so offering them these resources that they could point the kids to. To be able to watch inside their house when they were stuck at home, really allowed for the ministry to keep continuing and the discipleship to continue to happen.

Jeff Nichols 5:07
That is awesome, because the real intent wasn’t that this was going to replace all of our direct ministry to kids. It was going to be in an addition to our ministry to children, but in a much more explosive and exponential growth kind of way, right? Because we could reach so many more kids through this digital space, which what parent hasn’t given their their kid an iPad, and they’re scrolling through videos and everything and watching everything online.

Andrew York 5:32
Right.

Jeff Nichols 5:32
And to be able to offer this kind of content in a Christian way is just phenomenal. And for it to have such the biblical understanding and teaching. That’s just part and parcel of CEF, right? That’s what we do. We teach the Bible. We take, I love telling people, what does CEF do? We teach Jesus. Now, that’s what we do. We teach, we teach Jesus to kids. And that’s, it’s really exciting to see that, Philip, looking back at that time that was, that was no easy feat. Describe for people, the amount of space that you had to start working miracles in, before, as this transition started, and then what God kind of unveiled to you and made possible over the course of time?

Philip Neves 6:14
Yeah, well, we had a pretty good studio back then, but it was, it was on the smaller side, about 20 by 20, and you know, only maybe 12 feet high. And when you’re doing live action filmmaking, you want to put the lights up above people’s heads. You don’t want to have them like at eye level. So, and then when we did song videos, we have a lot of motions in our songs. And you know, people put their hands up and they jump around. And if they put their hands too high, or they jump too high, their hands would just go right off our green screen. But after COVID, we had a ministry here called Truth Chasers Club that was operated out of a larger building here on campus, and that’s no longer operated here, but it was sitting empty and God laid it on our leader’s hearts to see if we could move the Creative Services and studio departments into that building, and God provided some very generous donors, and we were able to kind of rebuild and renovate and move up from that one small studio to two larger studios and then this small blog studio that we’re in right now.

Jeff Nichols 7:18
Yeah, altogether, the studio, the big, big studio suites that we’re sitting in is, what, 10,000 square feet. So you went from a 20 by 20 room. This is where I wish we had the video podcast, because we’d love to be showing you this space right now, because it would blow your mind to see what God has given to CEF. But it’s, I think it was one thing, Philip, to think about song videos and making videos Bible stories, but to move to creating animated videos is a whole nother level, right? I mean, how did, how did that all come about?

Philip Neves 7:49
Yeah, what we realized was, you know, these we can make a lot of videos with live action. We have some talented people here on campus, but then those videos kind of have a shorter shelf life, they have a limited reach because they’re in English. And if you want to translate, if you want to dub over them, you look at it and you go, this has been translated. This isn’t in my language. Whereas with animation, it’s more expensive. You can’t do as much for as little, but it is easier to translate. And so our hope with animation, and the reason why we started looking into moving into that was we’re an international ministry, and we want kids everywhere to look at these videos and go, Wow, that was made for me, and God has something to say to me.

Jeff Nichols 8:32
That is absolutely amazing. That takes a whole lot of time, whole lot of effort, and a whole lot of really talented people that God has brought us, animators, editors, designers, graphic designers, and all those kind of people to make this work right. And I’m amazed, Philip, when I look at the variety of the styles of videos that is available through CEF, it just blows me away. We’re not just locked into one style. There’s a bunch of different styles, right?

Philip Neves 9:00
Yeah, well, part of that is us trying to figure out what we’re doing.

Jeff Nichols 9:04
I love that.

Philip Neves 9:05
We have a pretty small team. We have two animators, and then myself and we work with the rest of the Creative Services Department. We have writers, we have people who help us with audio recording. Just really good teamwork. But it’s when you when you talk about making animation. It’s a small, small team for the amount of content we’re trying to to cover.

Jeff Nichols 9:05
Yeah, we had a we had a I had some friends that were here visiting a few weeks ago, and they sat down, and Philip just showed them some of the variety of videos. That we… they could not believe that all of those videos come out of this studio, from this small team. It really is amazing. Andrew, you mentioned U-Nite while ago, and just tell us a little bit about what U-Nite is that’s the letter U, N, I, T, E, if you want to search for it now on your phone or the App Store, tell us about what U-Nite is and a little bit of a timeline of how that’s developed and really been fleshed out and grown over the last few years?

Andrew York 10:04
Yeah, well, our U-Nite TV platform is where we take all of these incredible videos that our creative team produces and provide them on a safe and free platform that kids can engage with. We do put our videos on YouTube or other platforms, but we really want to have a platform that we could manage from the ground up. All the content on there we have vetted or created of our own. And kids can feel safe. Parents can feel safe sending their kids there to engage with Bible focused content and know that what their kids are watching is what they would want them to be watching, what they want them to be consuming. And that’s really important to parents. They want that. They want that security and safety for their kids.

Jeff Nichols 10:46
Yeah, and we’ve got great partners too. I mean, we can’t do this alone. It’s going to take all of us to reach all of them, right?

Andrew York 10:51
Yeah.

Jeff Nichols 10:52
And so we got great digital partners that we come alongside and we they come alongside us, we go alongside them, right?

Andrew York 10:57
Yeah. We are always looking for opportunities to partner with other ministries. We just started a new partnership just this month with a studio from the UK called Go Chatter Studios, and they’re producing stop motion LEGO videos retelling Bible stories, and they do it in a beautiful way, and their team’s very talented at doing that, but that’s something that we feel, where they wanted to share with us, but we felt would be a great addition to the content, to sit alongside the things that we make here and be a benefit to the kids that are engaging with our platform. Just a little bit of a background of what happened this last year, the Lord really blessed U-Nite TV in a major way. We were blessed to see that at the beginning of last year, we started just over 10,000 users on that platform, and at the end of 2024 we saw a growth of over 170,000 users on that platform, engaging with it every day. And many of those users are outside of the US. At the end of last year, about q3 two nations in Africa surpassed the US in usage.

Jeff Nichols 12:14
Wow.

Andrew York 12:15
On the U-Nite TV platform, which is phenomenal. I mean, I never thought that would have happened. I know there was a lot of conversation of we need to provide this globally, but there was always that question in the back of our minds of, will they actually be able to engage with it? Do they have the connectivity to be able to engage with it? And we saw God answer that question for us last year, with those countries surpassing the U.S. in users.

Jeff Nichols 12:39
You said 100, it grew by 170,000 users?

Andrew York 12:44
Yes.

Jeff Nichols 12:45
That is absolutely incredible.

Andrew York 12:46
Yeah.

Jeff Nichols 12:47
God is working. God is on the move. And when He calls us for something, He equips us for something, right? And he’s definitely equipped CEF for this. So thinking ahead, I mean, this has been amazing. What has happened so far. How about the future? What’s what’s in the future for CEF and U-Nite and Creative Services?

Andrew York 13:04
Well, right now, we are actively working on the next set of animated videos that will be added to the platform, and Philip and his team are working on putting those animations together. There’s a rigorous process that we go through of writing scripts, recording audio, and then looking at rough cuts, looking at those animations, and trying to fine tune them to make the best video possible for the kids that are going to watch them. So that’s a lot of work that Phillips got on his plate, and his team is going to be working on this year. And then on top of that, we’re trying to translate these videos that we have made into eight additional languages, we’re going to take 13 of the videos that we have produced over the years and get those into eight additional languages by the end of this year, which is a major undertaking to be able to do that, and so we’ll be working with our teams around the world to make that possible and hopefully provide the best digital platform for the world, not just for the English speaking world.

Jeff Nichols 14:08
Wow, that is amazing. God is doing amazing things through a collaborative effort, right? I mean, all of these different departments and CEF are working together to get the gospel to as many kids as possible. Thanks for joining us today, Philip, thanks for joining us today, Andrew, and sharing your heart, for reaching children with technology. Is there something that we could be praying for you about as you approach the future?

Philip Neves 14:35
Yeah, I think for the animation team, we’re trying to do a lot with just a few people. So, you know, pray for our motivation that we’ll be able you know, you come into the office and maybe you don’t realize how many kids that are watching your video, you’re just plugging away at your work. So pray for our team to be motivated, and we’re short staffed and we have limited budgets. So pray for that.

Jeff Nichols 14:53
Short staff and limited budgets. That’s the definition of ministry, right?

Philip Neves 14:56
Yeah, exactly.

Jeff Nichols 14:58
Andrew, how can we be praying for you?

Andrew York 15:00
For the digital ministries team. If you could be praying for that translation project that we have to do this year, it’s, again, something that we haven’t tried before or done at this scale. So we need the Lord’s help with that, and just that, the opportunities for that content to be viewed by kids would be great.

Jeff Nichols 15:21
Great. We’d love to be praying for that. God is doing amazing things through these collaborative efforts. Thanks for joining us today and sharing your heart for reaching children with technology. Andrew and Philip.

Andrew York 15:33
Absolutely.

Jeff Nichols 15:35
If you would like to learn more about the U-Nite digital ministries offered by CEF, visit CEFonline.com/unite, this will also be linked in the show notes. Give us a like and subscribe to keep up to date on both this podcast and our kids programs.