Ron Gilbert Lots of people say they grew up on Lee’s campus because their father or grandfather was a professor or administrator. But how many people mean it literally? Ron Gilbert spent his toddler years living in Old Main, formerly the front building on Lee’s campus. In fact, according to Gilbert, the Central Gifts office is now where the family apartment used to be, if the Old Main tower was still standing. Gilbert’s father, mother, brothers, sisters, children, wife, in-laws all went to Lee, and most of them met their spouses here as well. Upon this grand tradition, Gilbert has put his own mark, by working almost every job Lee has to offer. In his 27 years at Lee, Gilbert has been a teacher, Assistant Professor, Director of Counseling and Testing, Director of Alumni, and now Director of Media Services. This collection of positions has one common thread: media, and that is where Gilbert finds his passion and his ministry. Although he has been doing media production since he was quite young, his obsession with video production emerged when he began teaching history in inner-city Baltimore, after he graduated from Lee with his bachelors degree. In that less-than-hopeful teaching environment, there was a new grant-funded television studio. “I didn’t have books, I didn’t have chairs, but I had a $2 million TV studio, and that was the God moment in my life, when I landed in a school with a TV studio.” He found the disadvantaged kids he was teaching really responded to the technology. “We brought in grandparents and interviewed them about World War II and I thought, ‘This is great. This is what I need to be doing.’” The obsession was further fed when, while pursuing his Masters of Education at The Johns Hopkins University, a visiting lecturer brought in a video to a counseling class which illustrated scenarios to the students. At that moment, Gilbert says he began to realize the connections between counseling and media. The same skill set required to interview someone in a counseling session was the same needed to interview someone from behind a camera. In 1980, he left Baltimore and returned to Lee to fill in for a history professor on leave. At the end of the year, Gilbert was hired on as the director of the Center for Counseling and Testing, a position he held for six years. He became the Director for Alumni in 1987 for one year and then took a 7-year hiatus from Lee. He began his own video production company, producing videos for churches, schools, and hospitals, doing commercials, producing television shows, and ultimately, winning national acclaim for his work. He is a three-time winner of the American Hospital Association’s National Media Award. He has worked with Arnold Palmer and his company, and at one point, in several air traffic control training facilities across the country, the acting skills of Lee students were showing in training videos Gilbert had produced for the Federal Aviation Administration. Gilbert has traveled to 33 foreign countries as a video missionary. He has been involved in the production of Church of God General Assemblies since 1988, YWEA videos and Winterfest video productions. What brings him to where he is now, is the Dixon Center, which opened in 1992. Gilbert, who had independently been doing all of Lee’s video production throughout his years in the business, was hired formally as the Director of Video Production and began the Video Production Center in 1994. The VPC has worked closely with the Department of Communication and the Arts in training communication majors for careers and ministry in telecommunication. He and his staff now video and edit virtually every video that Lee produces, from recruitment to historical archives to commercials to recitals to construction projects to chapel. But he’s not satisfied yet. Nine years ago while traveling in Australia, Gilbert suffered a massive heart attack. Far away from modern medicine and from his family, he had been working on a video project with a Bible training center in the outback. He lay nearly dying for several days before he was moved to a hospital, but life as he knows it, for Gilbert, wasn’t over. It was just about to begin. “The Lord touched me and told me I would recover. I came home after 38 days, and was so radically changed. That experience turned everything around for me, inside out, and helped me begin my focus on media ministry.” He is currently a candidate for the Ph. D. from Regent University, where he is researching the uses of media in churches and its effects on congregations. Gilbert has a vision that one day media pastors will be as common as youth pastors and music pastors have become. “I want Lee to be on the edge where we provide Media Ministers for the world. I am a Media Minister. That’s what God has called me to do.”   Posted on - 03/06/07