By: Mojmir Kallus, VP for International Affairs

This year’s online Global Feast 2020 presented both a unique challenge and a special opportunity for the network of the ICEJ national offices worldwide.

On one hand, our national branches had to dramatically change the way they reach out to Christians in their countries concerning the Feast of Tabernacles. Normally, they are recruiting Feast pilgrims for their tour groups, reserving flights and hotels, and advertising the daily programs in Jerusalem’s spacious Pais Arena. This year, however, they needed to inform their constituencies about the new stay-at-home online format, and explain how to register and what they would be receiving in the Feast package.

On the other hand, this year’s Feast was now accessible to nations and peoples who normally would find it difficult to make the trip to Israel. Through our online Feast webinars, we were in touch with believers from dozens of new countries on all continents. Many were excited to learn that if at least ten participants from their nations registered for the online Feast, their flags would be displayed during the Parade of Nations. And in many countries, churches, prayer groups arranged with us to host their own local Feast celebrations and watch the daily live broadcasts from Jerusalem together.

The work of our translators also played a crucial role in the success of this year’s Feast. Through our language coordinators Claudie Fierro (Spanish), Camille Troc (French), Haifa Lu (Chinese), and Anastasiya Gooding (Russian), as well as our branch translators in Germany, Finland, Norway, Holland, Italy and many other national offices, we were able to offer the Feast to a much wider variety of viewers around the world.

Some of our more established national offices also helped produce many of the pre-recorded Feast teachings, with Germany, Norway, Canada and Finland stepping in to ease the  burden on our Jerusalem TV team. These four nations do their own original television programming, and thus were able to assist in editing and wrapping more than 60 seminars which were part of the online Feast package.

We also must give credit to our chief information officer Alex Mills and our Feast registrar Tiffany Mallillin, as well as the TV and Media/Publications teams in Jerusalem, for their extra efforts to communicate with the international offices about the Feast content and registration process, and to solve many technical issues concerning the TV and online broadcasts. We are truly blessed with competent teams, both here in Jerusalem and around the world, who made this unusual online Global Feast such a success!