Celeste and Gabriel, children of Anthony Rudalf, pastor for the Poplar Bluff Church, competed in a competition that won them $500 to use towards furthering their ministry.
During the NAD CALLED Pastors’ Family Convention, pastors and their children could participate in a competition called “Evangelism Shark Tank.”
According to the CALLED Pastors’ Family Convention website, participants could “present their innovative and effective Evangelism and Mission outreach initiatives for their churches to a panel of judges.”
During the PK Shark Tank version, Celeste and Gabriel presented their evangelism idea.
“Our project is a community project that uses simple pictures, drawings or art to display Bible stories in the form of stop motions,” Celeste said during the presentation.
Stop motion is a filming technique where images of objects are moved in each frame to create the illusion that the objects are in motion.
Celeste and Gabriel explained how their ministry began. In 2020, when churches were shut down for the pandemic, the church the family was attending in Las Vegas, Nevada went to an online platform. The church was looking for content to be used in their online service, specifically for children’s story. Celeste had the idea of creating stop motions of Bible stories. She downloaded an app to make the videos and she and her siblings created a video.
“Each video takes about one week to complete from start to finish,” Anthony said. “The kids write the script, make the characters, record the voiceovers and edit.”
The children later showed their pastor in Las Vegas the video they created. He enjoyed it and decided to share it during the online church service.
Once the video was shared with the public, the children decided their ministry needed a name and settled on “Bible in Motion.” In total, they created eight videos which focused on chapters in Jonah and Daniel.
When the family moved to Missouri, the children stopped producing the stop motion videos. However, when they heard about the opportunity to win money to further their ministry, they decided to enter the competition in hopes of producing more videos to reach more people.
“I was very nervous [to present at Evangelism Shark Tank],” Celeste admitted. “But I was also excited. … [All the participants] were cheering each other on so that was very encouraging.”
During their presentation, the children showed one of their productions and explained how they plan to use their ministry to involve other children in the church and community to help in future video production.
Their successful pitch earned them $500 which they plan to use towards a camera, a microphone, lighting and possibly a 3D printer.
“Winning was definitely a wonderful blessing,” Celeste said. “… Shark Tank was a wonderful experience.”
The children plan to start a YouTube channel in the next month and post their video creations on the platform. They are currently in the process of making more content, including stories about Esther and Ellen White, which they hope to complete soon.
