Hi! My name is Ben and I am a missionary working with Youth with a Mission Lausanne in creative media. I am extremely passionate about digital media whether its videography, photography, graphic design, animation, or otherwise and their ability to reach people with the gospel.

I grew up in a very missions oriented family. My sister and I were homeschooled and this enabled our family to do several months-long missions trips as a family. In my teen years, I was blessed to have many opportunities to explore my interests in technology through serving at my youth group. One day while in conversation with my youth pastor I mentioned how cool it would be to do a funny video for announcements. She responded by handing me a small point and shoot camera and telling me to go for it. I gathered some friends and filmed a pillow fight in the church’s basement. Using a really simple editing software I put the video together with my favorite Petra song as the soundtrack. At the time, I remember thinking about how much I loved working on the project and that I wanted to do more like it. This was the start of my passion for digital media production and I had no idea at the time how it would shape my life in the years to come.

I continued to explore my new passion throughout the rest of my teens doing a large variety of projects, mostly for our church. My parents, seeing my interest, got me a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (the industry standard for all aspects of digital media production) and a subscription to Lynda.com so I could learn. They then added it to my schooling as a requirement right alongside other subjects like Math, and English. This was an exciting time for me as my knowledge and skills grew rapidly driven by my ever-growing enthusiasm. I branched out from video into photography, vector graphics, CGI, and so many more areas.

Thanks to the flexibility afforded to us by homeschooling, at the ripe old age of 16 I tested in and enrolled at Flathead Valley Community College. For many, choosing a major is difficult. This was not the case for me. I choose to do an AAS degree in graphic design. Due to my prior experience working with the Adobe products, I excelled in school. I dove head-first into my classes and was on the deen’s list every semester. One semester, in my advanced level Photoshop class, I was so far ahead of what was being taught I began to get bored. My teacher then gave me an interesting assignment, create lessons and labs that I would then teach and lecture on (all for extra credit of course). In effect, I was teaching in the class I was attending! I made many wonderful connections and friendships with both my fellow students and professors many of which I am still in touch with.

As the semsters came and went, I began to wonder what I would do after graduation. Being exposed to missions, I wanted to explore it a bit more on my own now that I was older. I discovered that the YWAM base in Tijuana Mexico had a 5-month school centered around photography in missions. Photography fit with digital media, so I saved up over the summer and left in the fall for Mexico. For the first 3 months of the school, I was in Tijuana at the base. Every week we had a speaker teaching on topics from foundational Christianity to photography in missions and everything in between. The final 2 months of the school was outreach, basically putting everything we had learned to practical use. Our school sent out 3 teams, one to southern Mexico, and two to different countries in Asia. I was on the smallest team of me and 6 girls bound for a country in southern Asia. Our team worked in slums in a city of about 2 million people, with the goal of showing people that they have incredible value and that God loves them more than they will ever know. We did this by spending time with families and individuals conversing with them and building relationship. We also took a small battery-powered printer so we could take photos of the people and print it out for them. This was incredibly impactful to the people. It was a very intense time filled with success, struggles, life lessons, and countless amazing moments.

During the 3 months in Mexico, the base in Lausanne reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in joining there creative media department. I was intrigued, honored, and excited. I spent time in prayer and fasting asking God for a sign one way or the other. Through a crazy set of circumstances, I got my answer, a resounding YES. So, I set my sights on the goal of moving to Switzerland to join them. I arrived home in February of 2019 and got to work. I arrived in Switzerland at the beginning of 2020, and have been working there ever since. At the beginning of 2022, I stepped up to become the head of communications for the whole ministry of YWAM Lausanne.

All throughout the Bible, we are told to share and spread the good news of Jesus Christ to every man, woman, and child. Over the millennia, this has taken many forms and this is even more true in modern times. With the rise of the internet and digital media there is a new massive opportunity to reach people faster, easier, and in much greater number than ever before. Most people spend hours every day in front of screens engaging in social media. This is doubly the case for young people many of which spend over 8 hours a day online. So, what better way to reach people than through there devices? This is the basic premise of what myself and the creative media team at YWAM Lausanne have set out to do. Our goal is to reach young people with the gospel by sharing what God has done and what He is doing in formats including video and photography that are readily accepted by the newer generations.