Troy Miller of National Religious Broadcasters
National Religious Broadcasters Convention 2024
Transcription completed by AI software, please excuse any misspellings or typos present.
Leray Heyne 0:23
Hello, my name is Leray Heyne and when the Lord gave me the vision for the Jesus Christ CEOs Media, I asked him why he wanted a state-of-the-art media ministry that would rival the best media organizations in the world. And Holy Spirit replied, I want to tell the world what Jesus is doing in business. I think you will agree. CBS is not sending 60 minutes to my door anytime soon asking me to do a weekly segment on what Jesus is doing in business. Amen. It is for this reason we are asking for your corporate covenant partnership. When your company gives to JC CEO Media, you are giving to a ministry that is committed to revolutionize the Christian Broadcasting with virtual reality filming studios at the core of our content creation strategy, our studios around the world will be immersed in cutting edge technology that gives JC CEOs Media professional capabilities for creating visually stunning TV shows, documentaries and movies that will tell the world what Jesus is doing in business. Owners with your company's faithful generosity JC CEO TV will proclaim in 190 nations on seven continents, the power and good news of what Jesus is doing in their nation's public squares of business. So right now, we are inviting you to join JC CEOs TV as a corporate covenant partner of the world's first Christian television network consecrated to tell the world what Jesus is doing in business. Thank you for your corporate partnership, and may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. God bless you.
Leray Heyne 2:08
Welcome back, we are at the National Religious Broadcasters convention and conference and I have the President Troy Miller with me, Troy, I'm going to welcome you to your own conference.
Troy Miller 2:19
Oh well. Thank you. This is great.
Leray Heyne 2:22
It is awesome. And you know, for the business owners, our ministry of Jesus Christ's CEOs TV is all about telling the world what Jesus is doing in business. So tell the business owners a little bit about National Religious Broadcasters and what you do, and so on.
Troy Miller 2:38
Yeah, so NRB, this is actually our 80th anniversary. So we're celebrating 80 years here in Nashville, by the NRB 2024, we've been around to protect the free speech rights in the free exercise rights of Christian communicators. That's a core what NRB does. But we also put on this big convention here. And one of the things that happens here, it's a really chance for people to come in and figure out what are the trends that are going on in the world of technology, what's going on in employment issues, for people that run organizations or business what's going on, in the mainstream media, regulatory, legislative, all of those things. We'll cover all of those at this convention and event. So we keep up people up to speed on all the latest things they need to do to make good decisions.
Leray Heyne 3:19
So what is the what is the latest with freedom of speech? Where are we at in that battle for Religious Broadcasters or Christians in general?
Troy Miller 3:28
So to battle fronts on freedom of speech that we're really looking at. And of course, there's the constant assault that's going on in the mainstream media. So we monitor that and we get out and we talk about the Christian voice and really speak out against the stereotypes that people bring up for for Christians, Christian broadcasters in Christian videos. But the the two big battles going on right now are in the social media spaces. That's the new you know medium, the most effective popular medium today is in social media and digital and the latest government collusion, the things that are going on, we have an amicus brief on a case it's going through the supreme court right now where the government, colluded with they partnered with social media companies and other organizations, Silicon Valley organizations to silence messages they didn't agree with, right. And this was purely done on a political ideology, kind of ground. It didn't have anything to do with hate speech or anything like that. And so that's a big battle front for us.
Leray Heyne 4:29
Wow. And so you just you just gave a great analogy, right? Sometimes we have business owners want to know, you know, why are you guys aligned with NRB? You just heard why we're aligned with NRB, we align with organizations like NRB that can advocate on our behalf and things that are important to Christian business owners. So we're trying to get Christus business owners to be more vocal, and social media is trying to get them to be silent.
Troy Miller 4:57
Oh, yeah, absolutely. The media today, so I came from Silicon Valley, I came from a $9 billion company, I spent 11 years in the Silicon Valley world. And so I know what the business folks face the inside of business here in Silicon Valley is not our friends today. There have been a number of Christian businesses out there. And and we're not talking about businesses that do Christian kinds of things. We're talking about businesses owned by Christians. And some of those Christians have been vocal. And they're having a hard time redoing their their liability insurance. They're having a hard time with banking and financial services, credit card services, we know of at least three organizations that their telemarketing companies cancelled them and said, well, we don't kind of like your views on the things you you're doing. So business owners have a lot to worry about, not just the people who are working in the Christian sector or talking about these but business owners have a lot of things that are coming against them. If you're going to talk about your Christianity or try to run your business from a Christian perspective, you're gonna get growing opposition.
Leray Heyne 6:04
Yeah. So, you know, business owners like to, you know, tangibly, you know, what, what is NRB tangibly doing to combat those things that you just mentioned?
Troy Miller 6:15
Yeah. So right now we're we constantly are looking at legislation that's been proposed, there's a couple of pieces of legislation going through the Congress right now, that would change a lot of our employment rules and and how we hire, implement things like the you heard diversity, equity and inclusion, they would codify these things into the law. So you as a Christian business owner would have to follow him. The other big movement, of course, is the is the green movement, the whole environmental movement on and there's a number of things going through Congress that would also codify these in as you as business owners, would suddenly have to start to do carbon credits, I don't know if a lot of your folks who heard about that, so you to start to have to pay basically attacks on how much carbon you're creating in the environment with small business owners don't have a lot of margins, right, they don't have a lot of room. So these things are very burdensome to them until their operations. So those are just two areas for examples that we're working hard on.
Leray Heyne 7:15
So you have people on the Hill working those things?
Troy Miller 7:18
People on the Hill, I go on the hill, quite often, we have our policy team that's on the hill. And so we're making sure Congress knows, in the end, the legislators know how this is gonna affect Christian businesses and small businesses across the country.
Leray Heyne 7:31
Well, thank you for what you're doing for businesses. So you just got to hear a great little brief on how NRB is part of helping you every day live out your faith at work. Now I want to shift a little bit to broadcasting.
Troy Miller 7:45
Oh.
Leray Heyne 7:46
So you know, you're you get to govern a big body like this. And we've made a big step here showing off virtual reality, some of the latest technology and as you know, people in the broadcast business are moving to this technology. How do you see technology affecting the broadcast industry.
Troy Miller 8:07
So I think that we live in one of the greatest times for communicators. So if you feel like you're being called into any kind of communication, any kind of media, any kind of broadcasting today, this is one of the greatest times because the price points the cost to get into doing that today and so inexpensive. When I started even in the broadcasting just 25 years ago, you were talking about hundreds of 1000s of dollars to produce and and air, you know, television program and cameras and everything. Well, you can become a video blog, blogger podcaster today for a few $100. And so and we need more voices, we need more people to get into Christian communications, and be influencers in the world. So it's just a great time. Look, Christian media is also growing the audiences inside radio monitors the whole radio industry, they just came out and report that Christian talk was the number two genre of programming for audiences and Christian music was the number four right and so the audiences are growing streaming audiences are growing some of the largest podcast that people watch are Christian podcast, and download out there. So it's a great time to get into Christian communication.
Leray Heyne 9:23
Yeah so you just mentioned that you have a virtual studio in your office now. So talk to us a little bit about that experience for you and where you see that going because that's what we're we're launching into.
Troy Miller 9:42
Yeah, people don't understand you and I are sitting in a sea of green here left. Not here but a virtual studio. They're just saying it's a great thing. Look, it look you can create this in our studio is just it's what normally we call an insert studio. It's set up at a 10 by 15. Room. Yeah, we can do multiple backgrounds on it not we could use it for live television. We can use it for recording And so it really enhances what you're doing? And now you know, there's the new things that are going on to a lot of the AI tools that are coming out. So AI Artificial Intelligence is the big talk. A lot of AI tools are coming out today are really automating and helping the production process get streamline. So you can go from producing like this to editing to live hearing it just a few, just really a few hours.
Leray Heyne 10:25
Yeah.
Troy Miller 10:26
With all the right equipment. So it's really neat. And again, the cost of it today is nowhere near what it cost you 25 years to do this. And the quality is so much better.
Leray Heyne 10:36
Which is even building sets. So when you when you first started. You know, what was would it cost if you wanted to build a set?
Troy Miller 10:42
Oh, so when I worked for Coral Ridge ministries down there, we were in the transition from analog to digital. And we saw we spent almost a million dollars to rebuild and to bring digital equipment and to do that transition, the lighting and all the things that you have to change the dual cameras themselves were were you know, $100,000 apiece that and they were just playing HD. Yeah. Now you can get a 4k camera for a couple $100. And the quality is just incredible to do.
Leray Heyne 11:13
Yeah. And in the sense you don't have to travel to locations, you can make it look like anywhere.
Troy Miller 11:18
We could be here where we're at. We could be in DC we could be in Israel.
Leray Heyne 11:21
Yeah.
Troy Miller 11:22
All in the same place. And like I said, and the quality of it today is so good.
Leray Heyne 11:26
Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to thank you for sharing with our audience about NRB. Because CEOs need to know why we're involved with this. Right. And, and I'm happy that we are. And I wanted to thank you for sharing a little bit of the your experience with technology, because that's where we're where we're going. So well do out of your busy schedule to sit down with me for a bit.
Troy Miller 11:45
Well, thanks for having me. And again, I'll encourage you out there. If you're a Christian, who's running a business today. This is a great time to be in business. It's a great time to keep up with the while you're doing in the gospel, but also make sure you're involved with these kinds of guys that can keep you up on the regulatory the other things that are going on. You're a great organization and we love what you do.
Leray Heyne 12:06
Thank you. Thank you. Bless you. All right.
