Overcoming obstacles

An update: Our World Journalism Institute (WJI) training course in Krakow, Poland, is happening right now, as we go to press with this issue.

The WJI Europe team is composed of Jenny Lind Schmitt, WORLD Features contributor, who lives in Switzerland, and Onize Ohikere, WORLD News reporter, who lives in Nigeria, as well as WJI Executive Director Lee Pitts and Assistant Director Naomi Balk.

We are grateful to God for allowing us to go forward with this project. A few months ago—given obstacles such as the language barrier with our host country and the need for one very impor­tant visa—we were unsure it would happen. But we kept moving forward with the plans, and God kept the doors open.

“Each time there was a challenge, I remembered His faithfulness and would pray for clarity once again. He always came through,” Jenny Lind Schmitt told me.

The team is leading the students through a crash course in Biblically objective journalism and will provide ongoing training after the classroom sessions are over.

Most of the students are experienced journalists already. They work in six ­different countries, including Ukraine. Our hope is that some of the attendees will contribute to WORLD’s reporting in Europe and that all of them will be ­better prepared to bring their Christian worldview to bear on their work.

This is the first international training course we’ve conducted since 2019 in Asia. The pandemic, with its travel restrictions and shutdowns, made it nearly impossible to take the WJI show on the international road the past two years. We’re glad to be back out there. We hope to hold international training courses annually in the future.

In other WJI news, this fall we’re planning our first-ever (first annual, we hope) summit of college journalism professors. We’re starting small this year—we think we’ll have 6-8 Christian professors for this first session—but this is another WJI program we hope to grow in years to come. The mission of WJI is to recruit, equip, place, and encourage journalists who are Christians. Working with college journalism programs makes sense as part of that mission.

Thank you for supporting WJI’s mission through your prayers, financial ­support, encouragement, and word-of-mouth promotion. This year already has been one of the most active and productive years for WJI, and for that we thank God, and we thank you.