By Joe Proulx
In the last several years, our staff here at Square One prayed for opportunities to connect with the Indigenous population of Canada through our projects. It seemed that those prayers were answered when we began a new online video project with Executive Director of the First Nations Alliance Churches of Canada, Howard Jolly, titled Come Sit with Me, which launched in October 2023.
However, at that same time, there was another opportunity in the works.
Virginia Spence contacted us in December 2022 looking to film a video that would tell the testimony of her husband Allan and the beginning of Courageous Heart Ministries (CHM). An organization run by Virginia and Allan, CHM seeks to spread the Gospel to First Nations communities throughout Manitoba by providing counseling, prayer, and supporting their basic needs.
“The idea originally came from a conversation with a sister in the Lord in 2021,” Virginia says, when asked about the video idea. “As she and I were working on the development of the CHM website, she asked me to share the story of how the ministry was born. She was very blessed by [Allan’s] testimony and said that his testimony would be good for the website, but perhaps a better way to capture everything might be to do a video.”
When Virginia and our team met to discuss what this video might look like, bigger ideas quickly began to take shape. Our leadership team proposed a series: a video podcast centered around the stories of Indigenous women, their experiences of accepting Jesus into their lives and how their lives have changed since then. Virginia was amazed by the idea and immediately got on board.
“The idea lined up perfectly with our ministry, especially as a form of storytelling,” Virginia says of why she got behind the idea so quickly. “The idea of a ‘courageous heart’ is of an overcomer. Many times, these stories feature someone who faces and overcomes a challenge in their personal life; whether it’s trauma or addiction related or something else; and then once they’ve come through that, they choose to go back and help people battle that same challenge later on. That is the core of our ministry.”
The pilot for the series was filmed in February of 2023 and, after months of fine-tuning and filming more episodes of the program, the first episode of A Courageous Heart was released on YouTube on August 1, 2024. Virginia has been so impacted by the creation of the project that she became a part-time intern with Square One for the summer of 2024, in order to find out more about how our projects are produced and distributed.
“It’s been an honour to gain an understanding of the level of professionalism and teamwork that goes into the making of a single episode. It's incredible to know that from this one small but highly energized studio that seven language groups are served with a message of encouragement and the hope of the gospel. The thousands of hours of work, time and commitment above and beyond speaks to the love this ministry has for so many communities.”
To watch the first episode of A Courageous Heart, follow this link.
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