The most powerful in the world rise and fall through this technology. A botched TV interview with CBS evaporated the bubble of awe around vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. President Obama recruited from CNN when he went looking for a doctor to lead the nation’s health care strategy.

But this story is about a more personal encounter with the power of broadcast technology. An old memory of a wardrobe consultant ripping through my closet comes to mind. “You have nothing that works for TV, nothing” was the conclusion. Or choking back tears in an orthodontist office because the smile I’d been born with was diagnosed as needing adaptation for TV consumption. Every missionary has legitimate sob stories of adapting to the field they are being called to, and mine are just a little easier to misunderstand.

One of the most common was the dark night of the soul when I realized I was being asked to stand on national television and request people pay me to talk about Jesus. Surely the Gospel doesn’t require an on air donation ask? We might as well get this big obstacle out of the way right off the top because this is the common ground we enter on when we broach the subject of using broadcast technology to impact culture with Christianity.

With an expensive and distant product, it’s hard to realize that broadcast donations are part of

the Great Commission. Rates for talking to a television audience begin at the low end of $250 for a half hour with less than 3,000 viewers at a speciality channel, to $210,000 an hour in prime time on a major network; if, that is, you can negotiate for it to be sold. Those opportunities are rare. Thirty-second TV commercials of your message range from $50 an airing on the smallest of networks, to $25,000 to be placed on the top networks in prime time audiences of 500,000. Then add the money needed to produce something that communicates.

If you apply for tax credits (which can carry up to 30 percent of your producing costs) you get an idea of the standards in broadcast spending. For a tax credit supported message, you must be able to prove you have spent a minimum of $100,000 to create every half hour of content. Christians rarely spend that kind of production money on their message, but that level of investment is considered necessary for quality broadcasting. Little Mosque on the Prairie – which CBC is now selling in the U.S. and Europe, is a brilliant show where a mosque outshines a church on the Saskatchewan prairie. Its production value is over $200,000 for every half hour.

For me this began very innocently. I had a gruff voice, a lower tone than any girls my age, and after one bruising adolescent encounter over its uniqueness, my father comforted me with his insight that day: “Lorna, your voice is different than anyone else’s and God is going to use it for something special.”

Naturally curious and naturally a storyteller, I wanted to become a reporter as soon as I discovered the profession. A Bible school professor made a referral for me to a radio station where he was on the board, and his influence and that low voice launched me into rural radio at Golden West Broadcasting in Manitoba.

I quit broadcasting early into my first big market of Winnipeg. I was scared, my self-esteem shaken, and I retreated out of fear. One day, praying over job frustrations, I felt the Holy Spirit tell me to apply at a TV station in Brandon, Manitoba. I made a cold call, and at the end of a job interview that very same day, an atheist news director concluded he’d hired a ‘Bible thumper’, but he didn’t know why.

In 1988, when it was time to be home raising two babies and journalistic work was in hiatus, I finally took time to listen to the media through eyes of faith. I thought there wasn’t much to be found about God in what I consumed, and I found myself praying “Lord, let me impact the media for you.”

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