Chris Mitchell

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, thanks for joining us on this week's dateline Jerusalem
on Prey dot com. And I'm joined by a dear
friend who I just spent time with in Egypt. He
is Mark Rogers. He's the founder of the Clapham Group.
He's also the founder of More Productions, and I would
say he's the executive producer, along with Jonathan Rumy from

(00:22):
the Chosen of a new movie called The twenty one.
And that's why we met together in Egypt and spent
several days together, a really rich experience. Mark, first of all,
tell us what is the Clapham Group and what is
More Productions?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
And Chris, first, let me tell you what a pleasure
it was to be with you again. That was our
second time to be in the least together and to
experience something so rich as connecting with this ancient Christian
community called a Coptic Orthodox Christianity that really is in

(01:00):
some ways the first church and presence of the Church
outside of Israel, and so to be able to be
together and with them was really a unique enriched experience.
So yeah, the Clapham Group is a consulting firm. We're
based here in Washington, d C. Were named after the

(01:21):
William Wilberforce community that you might be aware of. They
back in the eighteenth century took on the slave trade
and also issues like child welfare, child labor abuses, and
even animal cruelty concerns. They were Anglicans and Quakers, but
people evangelicals of deep faith, and they saw their role

(01:44):
in addressing some of the social ills of their day
and doing so from an explicitly Christian perspective. So my
firm is named after that community, called the Clapham Group
or Clapham Sect. I worked on the Hill sixteen years Chris,
as you know, with Rick Santorum, and after the Hill,
I started this firm to continue working on some of
those issues. More Productions is a sister company that we

(02:07):
started about ten years ago named after one of the
Clapham Group members. Her name was Hannah Moore, and she
was a playwright and a poet, and the way that
she contributed to their causes like opposing slavery, was through
creative capital, short stories, plays, etc. So More Productions is

(02:30):
named after her efforts or her way of basically shaping
empathy or awareness through creative content.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Well, one of the maybe films that you've done right
now is very creative and it's called the twenty one
and that's why we were together there in Egypt. The
twenty one is talking about ten years ago, twenty one
Christian men, twenty Egyptians and one man from Ghana were

(03:02):
taken by ISIS and under actually quite a production by Isis.
They really sort of elevated this martyrdom of these men.
I mean they saw the cop to Christians as their prey,
as they said, and they beheaded these men. But the

(03:23):
story is that you've told this story in an animated film.
What was the genesis of it? How did you why
did you want to make this film?

Speaker 2 (03:35):
You're part of that origin story, Chris. As you might remember,
six years ago you and I were on a trip
with Toel Rosenberg to Egypt for the opening in what's
called the New Cairo or the new capital city of
the largest Christian cathedral in the Middle East, as well

(03:55):
as a very large mosque, maybe one of the largest
as well. And this was I think an effort on
the part of presidentel Ceci to uh communicate to the
region broadly that Egypt was going to enter a time
of tolerance, and to some extent he used the word

(04:15):
coexistence between Christian faiths and Muslim faiths, and wanted to
affirm that long heritage that that Egypt has within the
Christian tradition. Again the Coptic Church being planted by Saint Mark,
you know, within the first decade or so of Jesus's death.
So we were there together, and I spent a little

(04:37):
bit of time with my wife, Leanne in what's called
Garbage City, which is an area in Cairo where the
economy we drove we drove food, as you remember on
the way to the Cave Church. Where the economy of
that community is recycling, but not the way we might
think of it here in the US. Literally, each family
and there is assigned a different neighborhood in Cairo, and

(05:00):
it's their job to go out get the garbage from
that neighborhood, bring it back to their own homes, and
in those homes, in that lower level or on the roof,
they recycle that trash. And that's that economy. So as
you drove through that town, you remember we saw just
house after house filled with garbage, and it was obviously

(05:21):
shocking at one level. But when we were there last time,
Chris I spent time in Cairo in Garbage City with
Mama Maggie, who is they call her the Mother Trace
of Cairo, her ministries in that area. Almost all those
people in Garbage City are comp to Christians. And what

(05:42):
I noticed we were there earlier six years ago, is
we saw pictures of these twenty one martyrs in homes
just all around. And I of course knew the story
is we all who are around can remember the images
of those twenty one men in those orange jumpsuits and

(06:03):
not denying their faith to the point of death and beheading.
But I was curious more more the more the story,
like what what, what was their story? How did they
get captured, who were they, what was where they, where
were they from? What happened to them after they were captured?
And there's very little in public record on that, but

(06:25):
they were acknowledged immediately by the Coptic Church as both
martyrs and saints, again a turn not as familiar to
us maybe as Protestants in the West. But what that
meant was that the church had come to tell the
story of what happened to them after they were captured.
And uh, and so I thought on the way back

(06:46):
home on the flight, boy the world needs to hear
the story of these men's faithfulness, not just on the beach,
but the torture they went through before they got to
the beach, which of course nobody knows. And question to
myself myself was how could we help the Coptic Christian
community to tell the story of their martyrs to the world.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
What did you find out as you did the research
was their backstory that wasn't really known at the time.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Well, they're all generally except for the one that you
mentioned from Ghana, from the same region in Egypt. It's
a couple hours south of Cairo. We drove down christ
and spent time together in that area. It's a very
poorer area, rural, and an area that is i'd say

(07:37):
a seabed for some of the more extreme Muslim perspectives.
So it's an area where the Muslim Brotherhood in particular
has taken foothold. So the Christians in that area are
under more persecution, I think than there are in other
parts of Egypt. Think in Cairo the communities are pretty integrated,

(07:59):
but in this area there there was and as you remember,
as you drove through, we saw the poverty and the
challenges they probably live under. They all were in their twenties,
some of their I think thirties. I don't know if
any were older, but some were married, some were not.

(08:19):
The economy is so difficult in that area that many
of the Coptic Christian workers in particular travel outside of
Egypt to find work to support families, maybe their parents,
or again if they're married, their wives and children. And
one of those areas that many went was Libya, where

(08:41):
these martyrs, where these men had all gone together. As
you remember, it's a small area, small town. So if
you have twenty of these men, everybody that we met
was related to one of the twenty, right, They were
either brother, a sister, or a cousin, or a grandfather
or certainly a mother or a wife. And it was

(09:02):
manual labor that they were conducting his construction. And yeah,
now we.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
All see, we have all seen our many have seen
the video of Isis on the beach when the men
were brought out and killed. However, you were telling me
when we're there in Egypt that actually their story goes
back weeks or maybe months of this torture persecution. Apparently

(09:30):
one of the guards had been captured and told what
had happened, how difficult and what were they going through
before the beach.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
So the story that's told by the Coptic Church is
the story that we actually heard from that pastor in
the church, the pastor of the church and Towiland Martyrs,
when he reaccounted for us their ordeal when they were captured.

(10:00):
Initially they were give an opportunity to recant their faith.
They were encouraged to do so kind of peacefully. But
when they all rejected those appeals, then they were They
were put under different forms of torture and physical labor
to break them and also psychological So that included being

(10:24):
stripped basically naked and being drenched with water for days
in the cold. It included being uh burned and branded uh.
It included being forced hot sand to drag big bags
of sand that were wet in the in the sand

(10:45):
to the point of collapse isolation, you know. So they
were all different forms that they were subjected to for weeks.
We don't know exactly the date that they were captured.
We only know the day that isis released the video,
which it was February fifteenth, which is of course counting

(11:08):
right up here, and so we don't even know how
long Isis, you know, had the footage before they released it.
There is some sense that the footage was photoshopped. If
you remember the images of the Isis soldiers they were
towering over the Coptics. That was probably manipulated imagery. They

(11:33):
weren't really that much larger. So it's one reason we
wanted to give the Coptics the opportunity to tell their
own story, since the Isis vied a certain propaganda sort.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, talk about the where they came from. The Coptic
Church is such a deep faith that they had to
withstand all the torture, the persecution, and the threat of
death and then finally death itself.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, the Coptic Church considers itself the Church of the martyrs.
You know at Saint Mark, who we know from the Gospels,
of course, was the first in essence missionary UHH, member
of the of the Early Church and planted in Egypt.

(12:23):
He was martyred for his faith and planted though the
church there so in essence of the blood of the martyrs,
was the first church planted in Egypt, and it uniquely
experienced a persecution that was probably an unrepeated anywhere else

(12:43):
in the church, so its own history is the history
of martyrdom. We also know, of course the church from
the monastic movements that started the early the Desert Fathers,
if you would. Alexandria, by the way, which is also
in Egypt is north of Cairo, was one of the

(13:05):
two major theological centers of early Christianity. So the Egyptian Church,
both for martyrdom, for the monastic and for the teaching,
was really one of the central hubs for Christianity for
the first several hundred years until Constantine was converted and
some of that moved more towards Rome.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, so you were inspired by their story and six
years ago you decided to make this movie. What happened? Then?

Speaker 2 (13:39):
Well, I'll tell you, Chris, I was coming back and
you know, obviously the traditional ways that we would tell
a story would be a documentary or maybe a scripted film.
To me though those felt too literal. You know, the
experiences that they had, and I there was there is

(14:01):
a transcript from one of the Isis members who did
give an account for what had happened. Obviously, none of
the Copter Christians survived, so there's no first hand witness
accounts from them, but but there is a transcript that

(14:22):
comes from one of those soldiers that did actually point
officials back to Egypt to where ultimately the bodies were found.
Remember in the Isis video is the Isis spokesperson said
they were going to throw the bodies in the into
the ocean, into the water. And so I think most

(14:45):
officials in Egypt assumed that there was no body to
be recovered. But this testimony did point out that there
was a mass grave that they were buried buried instead,
So so that that the veracity of that testimony to
prove itself out in that regard. When I got back
here to the States, I do have a I'm Anglican.

(15:07):
I don't have icons round the office, but I do
have a little tiny image of a famous icon called
Christ the Pentocrater pentocrator I I don't know how to
pronounce that last word, pa N too cr A t R.
And it's a unique icon. It's an image of Jesus
where half of his face looks kind of worn and weary,

(15:31):
another half looks more perfect, and it's a kind of
an effort to represent Jesus's divine and human both and
that actual icon that I have an image of is
from Egypt, is from Saint Catharine's monastery. And I looked
at that one and there is a photo of one

(15:52):
of the twenty one martyrs. His name is Corollas Fousy
and his he as a sleepy eye. And that struck
me when I looked at those two together, that he
represented or he looked like that image of Jesus in
that icon to me at least, and an icon, especially

(16:17):
in Coptic iconography, every saint represents, looks a bit like Jesus.
It's like we are called to reflect Jesus to the
world around them and as they have died, and an
icon is a window in essence into somebody who's in heaven.
It's like a window. You don't worship icons, you're reminded

(16:39):
of their sacrifice in our own life of obedience that
we're called to live. I thought, you know, it would
be interesting to use Egyptian iconography as the esthetic or
a way to tell the story of these particular martyrs.
And so that's where the idea of an animated film

(17:01):
was from that icon and that one picture of that
one martyr.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
It became quite a collaborative effort, correct with how many
animators and how many people involved.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
You know, that wasn't our intent at the beginning. We
ended up having over seventy animators and from over twenty
four countries. And I have to give an important shout
out here. My business partner with more productions is Mandy Hart.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
And she really was there in Egypt as well.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Mandy, to her credit, just carried the burden of this
responsibility to make this film happen. I just could kind
of from the sidelines, shot a few worth of encouragement,
but she carried the ball along with Todd Polson. I'll
give you that story real quick. Chris I shared this

(17:54):
idea with Mandy to do an animation rather than a
traditional filmed meant the first question is, you know, who
do you go to, like, who's what's the animation studio
that would have this kind of an aesthetic or an
approach using coptic iconography, which is very cartoonish if you

(18:15):
look it up online. They look like what studio actually
tells the story from a culture using the cultural aesthetic
of that culture to tell the story an animation form,
And there's really only one that does that with excellence.
It's called cartoons. Saloon out of Ireland their award, winning

(18:36):
a multiple I think Oscar nominations. Through a mutual friend,
we got connected to the founder of that studio, Tom Moore,
who was very intrigued by the project and he's supported
it financially. He's spoken to the script. He felt like
their studio at the time couldn't take it on, but

(18:57):
he had a former lead animator named Todd Polson who
had just left, who's a Christian, who left in part
to tell more stories like this and added us to Todd,
and Todd took on the project as lead creative animator.
The problem was we didn't have a studio then to
go to. There wasn't one stop shop, you know, who

(19:18):
could provide all the structure needed, which meant we had
to kind of do this by building our own virtual studio,
which meant working with Todd and his connections and people
are from around the world who were interested in the project.
So we ended up initially with a handful of different animators,

(19:39):
some of whom are Coptic Christians, some in England who
were actually animators who were Coptic. But as the word
got out that we were doing this, more and more
people volunteered and offered to help. Before we knew it,
we had again over seventy animators of all faiths, interestingly Protestant, Evangelical, Christ, Atholic, Orthodox, Buddhist,

(20:04):
even Muslim who contributed to the project.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
And Mandy said, I think when we talked to it
down in Egypt, they were at the end of the project.
There were people who were saying, can I be part
of it? But by then I think all the work
was completed, and.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
I think that's a testimony to the universal story that
is in you know, it is a Christian story of
Christians that were persecuted for their faith and ultimately died
for it. But I do think people of all faiths
understand that it is important to stand up for what
you believe, and we need societies that allow people to

(20:40):
believe without being worried about oppression and persecution.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah, you also mentioned the oscars. Apparently it did quite
well with the Oscars.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Well, it wasn't you know. Our goal was to glorify
God with excellence, and I think that's something that we
always need to strive for as christ I'm always hesitant
to support a project by Christians just because it's done
by Christians. If it's not good. I think we need
to make sure that when we glorify the Lord with

(21:15):
our work, the actual products are excellent in their craft.
And so when we did the film, that was our
goal always was to glorify God with excellence. And the
film was qualified for what was called an OSCAR shortlisting,
which is a voting process. The Oscar, the Academy goes

(21:38):
through where it looks at films that are qualified and
then shortlists a handful and it was shortlisted with about
fifteen other films it beat out was including Pixar's and
others for that shortlist, and then the next thing after
the shortlist is another round of voting called the nominations,

(21:58):
and it was not but it was shortlisted. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
But that's that's quite well and shows kind of a quality.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yeah. I think, Chris, it was in some ways just
edifying to know that the Academy was willing to accept
at a quality level the film. But also I think
for the widows that we met with was encouraging that
for them to know that so many people around the
world were willing to help them tell their story and
that the Academy itself was willing to validate that their

(22:29):
story is worth telling.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Yeah, talk about the widows. I mean, we had the
really privilege to meet them, and I think for you
to be able to tell their fathers and their husbands
and their brother's stories is quite a responsibility. So what
was it like to meet them and get the feedback

(22:50):
after they saw the film.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
House Well, as you know, I think I can mention
now on the video on this podcast that Jonathan Roomy
from The Chosen is an executive producer as well in
the film. Jonathan's father is Egyptian and so Jonathan half
of Jonathan's DNA is Egyptian. It was his first he'd

(23:15):
never been to Egypt before, and so we traveled with
Jonathan for this trip where he got a chance as
well to meet the widows. We were actually in this
small town called in Mina that a church was built
by the Competic Church then by the government's support, called

(23:37):
the Church of the twenty one. And in the church
you know below are the coffins that that the bodies
were brought back in. The bodies are no longer they're
they're buried. But as the reminder to everybody, So that
early service, Chris that we both were at which I

(23:58):
whispered to you. I think there's they're they're they're doing
the liturgy in English in part, and they did that
just for us. They actually they did liturgy and English
for us. But the widows from the twenty one were
standing next to the coffins of their husbands, their widows.
I think of the twenty that were that were married.

(24:20):
Then we have the privilege of showing the film to
those widows and the mothers and some fathers of the
twenty and I'd say what it was with trepidation. I
was just prayerfully hopeful that they would feel honored and
encouraged by it, knowing that it's also traumatic. There's a

(24:44):
scene towards the end of the film, Chris, as you remember,
where uh, they're being lined up on the beach and
the cloud of witnesses amongst them in a very supernatural,
spiritual way, but very tangibly. As they're walking on the beach,
you see the feet of Jesus amongst them. That was

(25:09):
meant to feel very tangible. The presence of Jesus was
meant to feel more real as the film went on
to the point at the end Jesus was almost physically
there on the beach with them, and I think that
was a real comfort to the widows. We heard from
a few afterwards that just the reminder they weren't alone
on that beach, that Jesus was with them, but that

(25:31):
ended by itself, was really important for them.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
It seems like one of the advantages of an animated
film as opposed to a live documentary, would be that
you could share some of the spiritual warfare, some of
the visions that actually some of the ices guards saw,
They saw angels and they saw Jesus, and that's woven.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Through the film.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
So and you can, as Joe Rosenberg said when we
did an interview, and you see this as he can
want he can do, he said, it's crackling the spiritual warfare,
and it's communicated that through the film.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
You know, it's true to what an icon really is
as well. Right to the community, it is a window
to the unseen, it's a window into heaven. So when
you see somebody that you know is alive in a
sense very much in some ways as C. S. Lewis
through the Narnia books talks about, is you know, maybe

(26:34):
more alive than we are right where the shadow lands,
right of God and so that idea that you are
having a window into something that is as true, if
not truer than our world, is the idea behind showing
those images and animation.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yea, what do you want the film to accomplish?

Speaker 2 (26:57):
You know? I think, Chris, the goal first and foremost
to strengthen the belief of believers who might be under
persecution around the globe. And so it's our hope that
when it releases on the fourteenth on the tenth anniversary weekend,
the tenth anniversary is the fifteenth of February, that it

(27:20):
gets virally circulated and people with a cell phone, whether
it's in the Congo or Nigeria, or whether it's in
areas of persecution you know in Asia, that they have
a chance to the story of others who've undergone persecution

(27:44):
and they be encouraged. So that is I think our
deepest desire is that it would go viral and encourage
Body of Christ and just broadly to encourage people to
deeper inquiry of faith and to be reminded that in
the midst of suffering, you're not alone and that God

(28:06):
is there. And I was involved with the film a
few years back. Chris called Silence that Martin Scorsese did
about the persecution of Christians in Japan in the sixteenth
and seventeenth century, and one of the important lines in
that film. You know, Jesus speaks two times in a
film called Silence, and so those times are obviously very

(28:30):
important to the author of that book that the film
was based on. And in the second time he speaks,
he says to the one priest to ask Jesus, where
were you in my suffering? Jesus said, I was always
there in your suffering. I encountered you and your suffering,
and you encountered me, and you're suffering. So Protestance we
don't always appreciate that that suffering is really a unique

(28:54):
opportunity to experience Christ and for him to engage us,
encounter us.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Well, how can people if they're interested in the film,
how can they access it?

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Well, the website is the twenty one film dot com.
Pretty easy, the twenty one film dot com and it
will be available. You can see it now. Actually, if
this has been aired before February fourteenth, you can go
online and just register. There's a place on the website
that says screener and you can click there and register

(29:27):
and see it. On the fourteenth, we will premiere it
globally and it'll be available on the website, streaming as
well as other platforms, so you can see it just
by clicking on the website and watch it, and you
can share it to friends and family, and hopefully, with
everyone's help and with the Holy Spirit, it will etch

(29:49):
and people from around the globe will see it. But
YouTube should also have it available on the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth to.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Watch anything else in your heart that you want people
to know it about the film about the Coptic Christians,
the Widows, our trip to Egypt.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
You know, I would say two things, Chris. You know,
I was just struck. I think you two were struck
by the just the rich history of both the Biblical
history of Egypt and the Christian history of Egypt. I mean,
you know, from Abraham and Sarah and of course Joseph
and Jacob and then later Moses, you know, I mean,

(30:30):
you know, Era and they were all born in Egypt.
And then of course Jesus himself, you know, with the
Holy Family, goes to Egypt and is there for probably
three three and a half years, and he grows up
there he probably spoke Coptic, you know, Egyptian before he spoke,
he maybe spoke he rw but he certainly had to
speak in a way that lived in the community. And

(30:51):
so I think for uh. And then of course later
the early church, you know, this is the real place
you know that the church was, was ground rooted, you know,
in ways we don't think about as often because we
think of the Gospels with Paul and his adventures, if
you would, but we don't. We don't think about the

(31:12):
role of the church and being planted in Egypt. So
I just feel like you. I both left saying, dang,
I wish more evangelicals understood and remember this and actually
would travel to Egypt and see this part of our
own story and the biblical story. Yeah, that was one thing. Again,
we both were humbled by the encounters with the Coptic

(31:34):
Christians of faith. Uh. Their style of worship is different
than ours, but we both really resonated with their deep
evangelistic commitments, their their their their faith was We felt
very I think kinship, didn't you, Chris. With the Coptics
we were.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
With oh, very much so. And I they do worship different,
their services are different, and yet their faith is so
deep and rich. It's also a touch of the supernatural.
It's not uncommon for visions and supernatural experiences. I think

(32:15):
Mandy said it quite well. She said, they have one
foot in heaven, they have one foot on earth, and
they really do live out a biblical faith that is
quite rich. I think we should give a shout out
to to Nurmine Riad who was there with us and
who is the founder of Coptic Orphans, and we got

(32:38):
to meet many of her staff that do really an
amazing job of redeeming the lives of young men and women.
You know, we learned that to be an orphan in
Egypt doesn't mean that you're fatherless and motherless. You just
have you could be your father could be gone. And

(33:00):
what they do is they've stepped in over the last
thirty six years, I believe now helping one hundred thousand
orphans to step in to make sure that that young
girl or young boy has a mentor has a tutor,
has an experience so that they can have an education,
so that they can actually go on to lead productive
lives and aren't sort of stuck in this cycle of poverty.

(33:24):
And we got to meet some of those graduates that
are now engineers or doctors or lawyers or even on
the Coptic Orphans staff. So that was to me a
learning experience of a wonderful ministry that's doing so much
redemptive work in Egypt itself.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Because we left not just with memories, but also we
did decide to sponsor a child, a wonderful little boy
that captured my wife's heart. So we've talked with one.
They have sponsorship model that they we're all familiar with,
so we've we've signed up. But I would say too,

(34:06):
we also saw the work they do to build Muslim
Christian relations really admirable and uh and I think is
the future for stability in that area is to build
deep relational trust.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
So yeah, yeah, we actually saw that in action in
one of the villagers that we visited. I was also
struck by the poverty there that is just seems to
be crushing, and yet there that's exactly where they're ministering
and bringing people out of that.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Well, Chase, I want to thank you again for giving
so much time to be with us. That was a
special treat to go back after six years from the
first trip, and it felt full circle. Yeah, I did,
didn't it. Yeah?

Speaker 1 (34:52):
Well, Mark, would you would you close us in prayer
about the about the movie and about the all of
our brothers and sisters we got to meet there in Egypt.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
So Lord, as we do go forth into the world
and are your reflection of your glory through our words
and our deeds. Lord, we just remember those Christians that
reflect that through the sacrifice that you gave on the cross,
that they're giving in their lives. And may we encourage

(35:26):
them and support them, help them tell their stories. In
many cases they are no longer able to tell their stories.
And we serve those that are the least of us,
least of us, and that we may, in doing so
encounter you as you do share with us. Is where

(35:47):
do we encounter you? It's often by serving the least
to the Maybe thanks and praise the opportunity to tell
the story of the twenty one In Jesus name, we pray,
And then.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
I also thank you for Mark and Mandy and Todd
and more productions and the many animators around the world
who have really put this together and as a testament
to the lives of these twenty one men who gave
their lives for you. Did not recant their faith and
left such a rich legacy. So we pray that the

(36:21):
film would, as many are praying, just go viral, spread
like wildfire and touch many, many lives more than we
can ask or think. We thank you Father for Coptic
orphans and what Nermine and her staff in Egypt and
in the US and literally around the world that they

(36:42):
are raising up young Egyptian boys and girls for productive,
redemptive lives. And Father, we pray for the family members,
especially the widows that we got to meet, who are
exhibiting such a rich Christian faith of forgiving their enemies

(37:03):
and praying for those men who took the lives of
their husbands. And we pray that you would continue to
bless them and provide for them and continued that they
would continue the faith. And we thank you for their
wonderful testimony in Jesus' name.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Amen, Thank you Chris as always.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Yeah, great to be with you.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Mark.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Just remind people how they can get the movie.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Of course, the twenty one film dot com and again
YouTube should be available over the weekend of the fourteenth
to the sixteenth.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
Yeah, for those that are listening, I've seen it. I
think three times. I had to see it down there
in Egypt. You had two screenings. I think I've seen
it again online. And by the way, there is going
to be a let's see a story on the seven
hundred Club on the fifteenth. Let's see what's our dates?

(38:03):
Is it going to be the fourteenth this Friday?

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (38:06):
So the fourteenth you'll see a story on the seven
hundred Club, and also we'll be doing that story will
also air on Jerusalem Dateline. You go to Jerusalem Dateline
dot com or CBN dot com and we'll have a
subsequent hopefully entire Jerusalem Dateline based on the film as well,

(38:26):
in the story of these wonderful men who we get
to meet someday in heaven.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Then, Chris, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
All right, bye bye,