World Vision’s Rod Yule bounded onto the stage at the Christian Media Association conference last night to receive a $10,000 prize, the Pilgrim Graham Wade award recognising outstanding media projects which are promoting and/or communicating the Gospel.

The Faith Effect: God’s love in the world is a video Bible study series tackling global poverty and injustice. It features key Christian leaders like John Dickson and Bishop NT Wright.

The Faith Effect encourages Christians to use social media to discuss the Bible evidence for social justice. Keynote speaker at CMA, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC analysed the effect of social media–a trend towards a personalised media.

He told an audience of media professionals, “Your audience wants to control their content”. This future gives both challenges and hope to Christian media: a global audience, but many voices to compete with. Scott was modest in his abilities as a futurist, repeating a mantra he has dragged around the broadcaster–the path to the future is not found but made.

As CMA’s CEO Mark Reddy put it, Scott has made the ABC into a cutting edge media organisation, and channels like iview and abc.net.au give a clue into his vision of a media future.

Mark Dando, Head of Online and Mobile for the ABC, also addressed CMA. In 2012 the rising stars of online are the smart phone (with more computing power than the first space shuttle) and tablets, with 80 per cent of Australians predicted to be users within a year. Mobile is emerging as the largest audience–this is a major shift. In October last year the ABC’s iview mobile audience became larger than its laptop or PC audience. He urged Christian Media to “think mobile” first.

Both Scott and Dando pointed out that it is hard to predict things more than a year ahead. Dando posited a media future led from the social media space rather than from ‘big’ media. No gatekeepers. Scary.

The pace of change is illustrated in this report. The Pilgrim Graham Wade award winning video is available on DVD. The next prize winner will probably be an app or other mobile distributed product.

At the CMA Awards last night, three lifetime achievement awards were also presented to:

• Brian Houston (who seemed to this reporter to be genuinely moved at receiving his award)

• Graham Marbury (who presented Nightline for over thirty years on Perth’s talk station 6PR)

• Haydn Sargent (a posthumous award to Brisbane’s Mr Christianity)

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Watch the first part of The Faith Effect here: