We’re Create Labs
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.
– 1Peter 4:8-10
What we do
As Create International grows in size around the globe, and as it responds to an ever-changing world; it is imperative that we possess the ability to respond quickly to global changes, stay ahead of the curve in the area of communication, and continually seek new ways to be more effective in all that we do.
Create Labs seeks to sit in this supportive niche within our global ministry, by being a team focused on team wellness, research, development, and problem-solving. It seeks to be a space of inventive creativity, a team dedicated to serving others, problem-solving, limit-testing, and radically new thought-processes. The goal would be that our ministry, at the international level, gains an avenue to purposefully research and develop new initiatives, tools, and resources, with the express expectation that even failure will ultimately lead to God’s Kingdom growing amongst the Unreached.
Ideation
Create Labs intends to be at the bleeding edge of future shifts, not only responding to changes but by initiating them as well.
Research
Nothing can be created or developed further without robust research. We feel like this currently doesn’t happen in as great a fashion as it could, and we are seeking ways to improve on this.
Support
Our Create teams infrequently have all the resources and manpower that is needed to holistically fulfil their various visions. Create Labs hopes to connect these teams with the various individuals and teams that can help.
Development
Create Labs seeks to develop new resources or new ways to use existing resources, that can be used to spread the good news amongst the Unreached.
Consultations
Teams are frequently wanting to try something new, but don’t where to start.
Training
Create Labs seeks to help others upskill and improve as artists in their own rights.
Examples of existing or possible services
It is our hope that this list would broaden (adding whole new services), as well as become more robust (basic help becoming professional help), over time as our relational web grows. That said, this is currently what we’re able to do.
Software and hardware research and development
If you have a piece of software that you need researched or compared to others, we can do that for you. We’ll return with a rundown of pros and cons, our recommendations if you’d like that, and a go-to plan with how to use it well.
As with software, we can research and compare various hardware options you’re looking at. Depending on the equipment, we may work closely with a team member that is expected to use it.
Our Heart:
God has called you to a vision we share; communicating Jesus to the Unreached. We want you to focus on this, not get bogged down with which financial or time management software to use, or which phone-videography setup to purchase. Let us do the tedious work if it means you can better use your other talents to further the Gospel.
Team consultation, pipeline creation, onboarding, and systems improvement
Your team has been brooding on something, and it’s time to make some movement on something new. We can help focus your attention on what’s important to do/think about first, and what can wait. Think of us as a verbal processing machine, that can coach you through some hard-to-untangle problems/opportunities. You talk, we listen, and then we both make a plan (let’s also be honest here, Keegan will probably talk as well).
Our Heart:
‘Team’ matters because God has made us all with unique skills and abilities. A fresh pair of eyes on a problem is, sometimes, exactly what the doctor ordered in untangling issues or coming up with an action plan. But not everyone, or every team, always has access to people with those fresh eyes. We’re here for you, we like long meetings (when they’re fruitful), we love problem-solving, and we love new things. Seriously.
Counseling and Wellness consults
It is recommended that we go to our doctor every year for a physical check-up. This check-up assesses our body’s overall physical health and catches potential illnesses. A wellness check-up provides a similar service, designed to assess the emotional, mental, and spiritual health of cross-cultural workers.
Our Heart:
Equipment, software, and systems are good, and are useful tools to tell people about Jesus. But you are infinitely more important. In cross-cultural living, we often encounter unique challenges that affect our personal well-being, ministries, and relationships. A wellness check-up is a preventative measure, a pause in life to reflect on and evaluate our general well-being and make appropriate adjustments.
Debriefing
Debriefing is not counseling, it is a way to process specific events or periods of time by exploring the impact and interpretation of that experience. Debriefing can also be helpful in developing a preventative or restorative plan for holistic well-being.
Our Heart:
We know that not all of our Create teams have access to the same wellness opportunities. But you all deserve it. We don’t want you to just be ‘efficient’ in your work, we want you to be holistically healthy; and debriefing projects, big life changes, or other major events, is a brilliant preventative measure in keeping you going.
Basic IT services and tools
We have basic IT tools that may be of use to you. Things like; GSuite accounts, online media servers, website hosting accounts, and LMS systems.
We also have some basic IT skills, and we’re happy to chip away at an IT problem you might have. We’re also able to help you with some basic website maintenance and design if needed.
Our Heart:
Again we share the same Create vision that you have, to see the Unreached know God. And we’d like it if you could focus more on creating new resources than fiddling for days/weeks on a website or IT issues. Let us help.
A Web of Relationships
In a very real way, many of our future problems, or opportunities, simply do not exist yet, this here lies at the heart of our niche; Labs provides the Create family with a distinct method of approaching them with the freedom that our current teams simply don’t possess.
Because of this desire to be responsive to future problems and needs we’re developing a responsive group of people with distinct skill-sets that are passionate about solving new problems and helping Create members thrive in the vision God has called them to. In many ways, this ‘relational web’ would function similarly to our current ‘Global Advance Teams.’ It would pull in new members that might not fit perfectly in teams with more distinct focuses, but would also take advantage of people within said teams that possess skill-sets that could be used internationally. With that in mind, one can see that this web of relationships wouldn’t then act as a singular team, but rather grow, shrink, split, merge, focus, and defocus as needs, problems, and opportunities arise.
Labs is our one-stop-shop for our problem-solving, our research, our team-health needs, our IT needs, our technical questions, the list goes on. It acts as connective tissue between a team and a desired outcome and/or project, acting as a support structure that enables and accelerates that team.
Labs then wouldn’t revolve around a geographical location, medium, or even an audience, but rather as the support behind these teams. It would serve as a problem-solving hub pulling expertise from dozens of avenues to provide support to those in need. If the GCRC acts as Create’s ‘front-end’, providing a public-facing element for us as a whole; Labs would be the ‘back-end’ allowing us to have a team dedicated to helping us be more effective, efficient, focused, and healthy.
It is our goal to extend our relational web fairly quickly to help with specific issues I believe we can see coming. Because of this, we’ve started to work out very broad priority list in seeking nodes of the web that have specialist skill-sets. Below you’ll find our progress
- IT Specialists
- Web Design
- People Group and Culture Researchers and Anthropologists
- Social/Communications personnel and/or fundraising professionals
- Dedicated clinical/soul-care workers
- Hardware Developers or specialists
- Software Developers
“Moksh 7 Stories is a series of contextual animations to present the Good News of Jesus in a relevant way to a Hindu audience. This project absolutely could not be happening now without the fantastic animators who joined our team through connection with Create Labs’ Campfire initiative! Our project had already been underway with a small international team and we desperately needed skilled, creative help to fulfill the vision. Campfire connected us with truly gifted, hardworking, generous, anointed individuals, who have been a real answer to our prayers and are helping us take a dream and make it a reality. It is also so good to know that there is a potential network to reach out to whenever we find we have a gap in our team or someone already working on the project is unable to continue. Collaboration is a key to the Kingdom! Thank you for making being a catalyst for creative collaboration with a Kingdom purpose.“
“Three months ago, I had no Christian filmmakers among my contacts. Just one meeting with Keegan at Create Labs changed all that! I am now plugged into a whole community of Christian filmmakers networking on the Campfire system. This friendly, collaborative environment is a space where I can ask skilled Christian artists for advice and a second opinion on my work. If you have a vision to use your creative skills for the extension of God’s Kingdom, then Campfire is the community for you!”
“The success of our online training ministry simply would not be possible without Create Labs. The Create Labs team provided the vision, digital infrastructure, and passion needed to bring our training online. Now our online filmmaking course is educating students and teams who would not have access to our training otherwise. It’s also leading to new partnerships and connections between ministries. We’re excited to see how God uses this next generation of storytellers!“
Create Labs is a branch of Create International, a trans-national ministry of Youth with a Mission. Create International is a family of ministries made up of teams of skilled workers dedicated to share the gospel to unreached people in creative and culturally-relevant ways through media. This gospel media is made for people with specific cultural and linguistic backgrounds and made to be widely distributed by disciple making movement teams, local believers, and motivated organizations.