Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut

In today's digital age, the internet offers powerful platforms for sharing ideas and building connections. Whether through podcasts, social media , or online communities, these tools allow us to reach hearts and minds across the world. How can we use these platforms to make spiritual connections and conversations? In this episode, I have Craig Dehut, CEO and Co-Founder of Appian Media. He shares how he brings the Bible to the world, gathers support, and distinguishes between valuable input and distractions. He discusses his journey into biblical content creation and how the content is used to bring people together. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting people with the content in the Bible. Now, as you know, in this show, I’m not telling you what to believe in or telling you what to think or anything like that, but the Bible has a lot of content that people need to resonate with and I think almost everyone should have some sort of a grounding in something bigger than themselves. My guest today, Craig Dehut, he is the COO and co-founder of Appian Media and a documentary filmmaker. --- Craig, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for having me. Well, let’s start a little bit with your story. Where did you originate? Were you always interested in creating content and creating stories and also documentary filmmaking? Yeah. So, it took a variety of forms, but growing up, I really was always interested in stories. For a while, it took the form of just writing stories. I wanted to be a cartoonist there for a while, so I was interested in drawing and illustrations. But, eventually, about 13, 14 years old, someone let our family borrow a camcorder and so myself and my siblings went out into the backyard and would create all kinds of ridiculous things and I just kind of fell in love with the medium and decided to go to film school, graduated from there back in 2007, and, originally, that was supposed to be kind of major motion pictures, I wanted to write and direct feature films, but my career kind of took the form of working at television news and other forms where I got to document real stories, actually shoot interviews and follow news stories of real things that are happening, and, eventually, kind of fell in love with that format, that form of storytelling, and was able to combine that with my love for scripture, my love for the Bible, and put those two things together. So, at some point, you decided to go out on your own, or not on your own but be the co-founder of your own company. What prompted that particular move? Sure. So back in 2015, I was working at a video production company at the time, but also had recently met my, who’s now my co-founder, Stuart Peck, another Christian creative who had moved to the Indianapolis area, and he and I were just shooting the breeze, meeting over coffee and talking shop, talking about the industry, and talking about the things that we wish were out there, especially when it came to like Bible videos. We were finding things that were hard to watch. Some of them were just kind of hard to watch. They were not keeping the attention of the kids that we had in our Bible classes. And it was actually Stuart who kind of pitched the idea originally, was like, “Hey, what would it take for us to take a group of us over there, over to the lands of the Bible, and produce the content for ourselves, something that’s biblically accurate but also professionally produced?” ’It’s got to be packaged well so that people will actually want to watch it and we wanted to make it freely available.Share on X And so we did that by creating a not-for-profit called Appian Media. And we were able to, through donations, through crowdfunding, take our first trip to Israel in 2016 and have been creating content ever since. So when you looked at the content that was already being created, you obviously saw the gap, you saw something that was missing, something that wasn’t really capturing people’s attention. What was that gap? What did you see that was lacking in the content that you were viewing, observing, and watching other people share? Yeah. So, specifically, Stuart, at the time, was teaching a high school Bible class. Schools have been using media and smart devices and technology to help the kids learn for a long time and he was noticing, at least in the Bible classes that he was participating in, that, for the most part, we were kind of encouraging to put all that away and use the book. I have no problem with the book. God chose to communicate his will through written word, but to also make use of these tools, these media tools, and Stuart was just finding things online that were either made such a long time ago that the production quality was very obviously outdated and was not keeping their interest or we were finding things where it was very clearly made – as you can imagine, documentaries about the Bible, a lot of them are kind of this sensationalized gotcha, kind of almost reality TV that feels too produced, too unbelievable, and we didn’t want that either. We wanted something that was just real and genuine with no particular bias, just communicating scripture while showing the lands and the culture and the history in a way that’s engaging that you want to keep watching. Yeah. Is that part of the problem with some of the content, and even with some of the challenges that we observe now with the younger generation connecting with the Bible in general that people have documented quite well that, obviously, you have the outdated technology, which is going to just be okay, if you ever watched like a movie in black and white or something, even if I think all the way back to like the 1910s and 1920s when they had those silent films and it’s kind of fun to see where we came from but no one’s actually going to sit through, say, a two-and-a-half-hour silent film right now. Right. But also nowadays, with the impact that our shorter attention spans have produced on journalism and even on movies and stuff like that where people are just trying to get your attention more than actually expose you to information. Yes. We were certainly not the first ones to make videos from the Bible lands, we’re certainly not going to be the last. What we were finding was a lot of content where the camera’s on a tripod, someone’s standing there communicating biblical truth but the camera’s not moving, Jerusalem’s way off in the distance, and we don’t feel like we’re there. And so not just the technology that was being used but also just the mechanisms of storytelling. We wanted to help the viewers feel like they were actually on the trip with us so we go into the cities, we talk to the people, we eat the food, we experience the culture, and we get down into an archeological square and dig with the archeologists just to help them feel like come along with us, you’re there with us as we’re sometimes even discovering things in the moment and that’s what we were seeing was lacking. And then I think one of the other major things was a lot of content, if it is going to be produced well, and there is some good stuff out there, a lot of times, it’s behind a paywall. You have to either buy the DVDs or sign up for the subscription service and we wanted this content to be freely available. We wanted Bible class teachers or families, homeschool groups to say, “This is good content. I can trust this as a reliable source, and I wanna be able to use it at no cost,” and those are some of the key elements of what began Appian Media. Now, did you take inspiration from any other travel-related shows that seem to be holding a lot of people’s attention? And I just think of like Rick Steves, Samantha Brown, any of those like travel channel or even like food shows where people kind of go places and those shows have kind of reached a decent audience. We did. We certainly did. Stuart, at the time, was actually working as a producer for HETV and so he was familiar with the style that makes the viewer feel like they’re there and keeping things engaging and moving. There’s a series that continues to produce some good content. Dave Stotts with Drive Thru History where a different format, it’s a single host, he’s talking straight to camera but he’s walking through those places and getting involved and invested and I think that was some of those elements that we tried to borrow. There’s a series called That the World May Know that some solid biblical teaching, I think he did a really good job. It has been a couple decades since it was produced so it’s starting, in many ways, to show its age a little bit but we appreciated some things about that. We just kind of borrowed from a lot of different inspirations and sources and said I think that we can try to make it this way. And then when you first developed this vision and saying that you didn’t want it behind a paywall, you want children to have access to it, everyone have access to it, what kind of planning or considerations did you need to think through as far as making it happen in a way where you’re still earning the income you need in your life and having the time to basically live your life, like social life, family, connection, rest, everything else. Yes. Rest, yes. It is a good consideration and even now, eight or nine years into this, we all are working this as a secondary job. So we all kind of have our day jobs. I work as a freelance video producer, producing content for other clients and not-for-profits and Stu works in the media industry as a sound recordist. But you’re right, these things aren’t cheap to make....