Important Update....

Slight Change of Name.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hi everyone, hi friends. This is a special update on some news I want to need to share with you. It's been an exciting couple of weeks combined with some uh demanding things on the side as well in my personal life. But I wanted to tell you that week before last we had the big London podcast show up in the Business Design Centre in London, and I got offered a ticket to a Buzz Sprout gathering. Buzz Sprout are the people who host my podcast, they're the biggest podcast hosts in the world with 400,000 podcasts enabled through their software and platform, and they are the ones who take my podcast and help me distribute it to all those places around the world you listen to it and also enable me to do what I do really. And I've always appreciated their ethos and their attitude towards it, and they're particularly favour those who like to use audio format. Anyway, I had no intention of going up to London for that because A, it costs a lot of money. Secondly, I have caring responsibilities here back in the north of England, and uh also I didn't realise that that the Buzz Sprout people would be there. So I wasn't going to miss that if I could, so I got someone to cover things for me back home and I headed up there and I got there quite early. My plan was to get there and back in a single day, which was quite a challenge. I was up at six in the morning and got back at about 10.40 at night, but I was able to have four hours in London about uh and I got there a little bit early for the for the gathering with the other Boz Sprout people, and I met Tom, and that was really interesting because Tom Rossi told me his founding story, and he was an intern at a Christian church in Florida, I think it was, and he was working on helping that church back in the noughties develop a tool which could then be inserted in the website to allow them to distribute their sermons in a way that was free from all the financial constraints and the advertisers coming in and potentially sort of inserting adverts in the material. And he developed that tool originally, he thought, as a plug-in to go on websites, they then rolled it out amongst the denomination that they were connected to, and that would go on to become Buzz Sprout. So we shared that same background together, and I actually found some of Tom's sermons on a podcast way back in 2009-2010. So we shared that, and I actually had 15 minutes almost one-to-one chatting with him at the start because I got there a little bit early, and he also presented me with a 10-year podcasting pin and this t-shirt, which uh it was really nice to be marked and and uh recognized in that way. That's the great news out of it. But out of that, maybe I'm not saying definitely, that maybe the publicity around it, a bit of an issue popped up which had been at the back of my mind for a couple of years. Some of you may be aware of it. Let me just open up the email. I got an email from the Bible Project. I don't, I'm sure you're familiar with them. I wasn't in the UK when I launched. I became aware of them about eight months a year after I'd launched it. There was a YouTube channel called the Bible Project, and I really like what they do, the animation videos they do, and I know loads of churches use them. So in my mind, I thought, oh, that sounds very like what I'm doing. Now, though I've been podcasting since actually dipped the toe in 2004, but been podcasting since 2009, started with a thing called the Big Chunk Bible Project, and then moved on to the Life Podcast, which then after the lockdown, I encouraged everybody to go back to church and we launched together this project to work through the whole Bible. Anyway, they reached out to me saying that they're a digital animation studio from Portland, Oregon, and that they also have podcasts within their organization, and they were concerned that this might cause confusion. Now, they pointed out they've been operating under the name for many years, and I did notice that they've existed since 2009 and registered the Bible Project podcast in 2015. And some of you may have noticed a two or three years ago, I inserted daily into my title to try and create a differential. Anyway, they were a bit concerned about that, which I can understand why, and they were asking to have initiate a conversation about the podcast, try to reach out in a non-adversarial way, as they put it, and they would like me to consider renaming myself. Now that did worry me slightly, but uh let me see if I can find the scripture. But I, and you'll remember I taught on this, I very clearly remember what Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, where he says it's 1 Corinthians chapter 6. He famously suggests that it's better for a believer to suffer a personal loss or BD defrauder than to damage the testimony of Christ through a lawsuit. So I immediately decided that I would not contest it in any way, and I'd simply ask them what they wanted me to do. So my reply, let's see, said something along the lines of I'm happy to have the discussion, explain my story to them, and I just asked, rather than becoming adversarial, if they could help me transition with some advice in a way that enabled the tens of thousands of people of around the world in over 200 countries to listen to my podcast and all those people who I'm encouraged, I've encouraged to study it with me every day if I could continue to keep doing that. So I really just left it up to them to see what they should say, would say, and they said, let's see, they would like me to tweak the name of the podcast, and they suggested the Daily Bible Journey podcast. I thought they'd want more of a differential. The name is not taken by anybody else, and it helps does help maintain that sort of unique USP of what I'm doing and the mission behind it. And they asked me to put a disclaimer in the interim in the podcast description to clarify that it's a note associated with the Bible project in Oregon. And I basically said, yeah, sounds reasonable, and I'll bring in the process straight away. So that's where we are now. So I haven't settled completely on whether it's going to just be the Bible Journey podcast or the Bible Journey Daily Podcast, but it's not, hopefully. And I've reached out to Buzz Sprout and I've sent my regards to Tom, and the help desk has come straight back and told me how to transition it in such a way. Let's try that again, that it shouldn't affect the way that uh people find me, and also you guys who are listening to me on other places other than Patreon, you'll still be able to find me without having to re-subscribe. So the title will change and the RSS feed, that's the technical thing, uh, the way in which the podcast is distributed, which is why it's a private distribution system. It's why the advertisers cannot insert adverts in my podcasts here on BuzzSprout or on Patreon, and the ones that do it do it because you're choosing to have the facilities of them providing you those podcasts for free, like in places like Apple's and Spotify, and that's quite reasonable. They provide a service and they need to pay for it. So uh it was Buzz Sprout suggested that I do a quick short video episode to update everybody on what's going. So I just want to thank you because I know there's people always praying in the background, and this could have been very difficult. And trusting in the Lord, trusting in the word which we study and what it advice in situations such as this, it seems to be going okay, and that transition should be fairly seamless. Just a very slight change in name you'll see when the buzz start when the podcast episodes start appearing if you're listening on these other platforms around the world. So thank you for supporting me in this way. Thank you for those who pray for me at this time. A few of you are aware of the sudden increase in my caring responsibilities here, which has meant in some ways I've been very restricted, but in other ways I've also been very productive because I've been much more sort of trapped locally because I need to be here for some people. So thank you for your continued support, your continued financial support, and also for most importantly, your continued prayer for support. I really could not be doing this without you. I'll see you back very soon. Bye bye now.