The Living Church of God’s World Headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, has seen an influx of new employees over the past few years, each bringing fresh perspectives and helpful talents to God’s Work. Recently, we had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Alex Heykoop and Mr. Javid Khan, who are serving in the Television Department as Senior Video Editor and Multimedia Designer, respectively. We have enjoyed working with and getting to know them and thought you would appreciate learning about their experiences working at Headquarters.
Mr. Alex Heykoop
Mr. Alex Heykoop now attends in Charlotte with his wife, Rachael, and with their four children. His journey with the Church is rooted deeply in his family’s history. “I was born in the Church,” he says, “third generation in God’s Church. My grandparents on my father’s side came in the ’70s and my grandmother on my mother’s side came in, I believe, in the early ’60s.” A mechanical engineer by education, Mr. Heykoop’s transition to working for the Church was somewhat serendipitous. “My brother back in 2014–2015 had asked me if I was interested in coming to work for the Canadian Office, and that’s how I got hired in October 2015.”
Mr. Heykoop’s role in Canada was multifaceted. “Up there, I was kind of split between three different roles,” he says. “I was helping out with the TV department, mainly with doing camera work and some more administrative-type stuff. I was in the Canadian Mail Processing Department, helping to print booklets and do the mailings. I was also helping my brother with maintenance and scheduling on the websites. Over time, they started the Viewpoints in Canada, and I was editing about half of those.” This diverse experience prepared him well for his current role. “What brought me down here in large part was that I was born a Canadian-U.S. citizen, so it was easy to come across the border. When some opportunities came up here in the video-editing area, it was an opportunity to focus on one department, one thing, instead of being a jack-of-all-trades. So, at the end of 2019, we came down.”
Mr. Heykoop has made significant contributions since joining the team in Charlotte. “Recently, I’ve become the senior video editor,” he explains. “I am responsible for maybe 25 percent of the graphics that go in the telecast. That’s one of my main things.” His role also involves ensuring consistency and quality. “As the senior editor, it’s also my job to make sure that all of the graphics are in a consistent style and that everything’s getting done on time. That fits well with my other role in process improvement—helping Mr. DeSimone figure out how to optimize processes, where we can remove waste, and how we can improve certain aspects without overinvesting our time.”
One of Mr. Heykoop’s most satisfying achievements is the telecast workflow process. “I got to help put some more of the finishing touches on it,” he describes, “getting to where we’re building telecasts like an assembly line. Everyone has their job at a specific time; everything goes smoothly that way. Not just so that we can get the quantity out, but also so that we can safeguard our time to spend on the quality aspect, too.” This system has indeed allowed the team to produce a greater volume of quality content. “We’ve been consistently putting out 30 telecasts a year and we’ve been having time to work on Whiteboards, Behind-the-Work films, semiannual DVDs, and different projects like that.”
The feedback Mr. Heykoop receives is a helpful motivator. “I mostly get feedback from the presenters and fellow employees who have watched the telecast,” he says, “but every once in a while, we get a YouTube comment or a letter or something and someone mentions, ‘Hey, this graphic just really explained the point really well.’ We’re here to enhance the information or help explain it visually. It’s encouraging to hear that it’s been impactful.”
Balancing quality and timeliness is a challenge Mr. Heykoop continually navigates. “All of us here want to just make the best, most awesome, over-the-top, cool graphics,” he says. “But if we only get ten telecasts out a year, how effective is that going to be? At the same time, there’s a time and a place to say, ‘Hey, this one’s due this week, and it really needs a little more work to push it over the top.’” Another challenge is creating accurate biblical depictions of people, both ancient and modern. “When depicting things from the Bible—how do you know what King David looked like? But then, even just representing traditional Christian families nowadays—it’s hard to find footage of people reading a Bible without seven piercings in their ears.”
Looking forward, Mr. Heykoop aims to improve the department’s graphic capabilities. “I’d love to see us getting even better at graphics,” he says, as well as “building a library of accurate biblical depictions.”
Mr. Javid Khan
Mr. Javid Khan’s path to God’s Church began later in life. “I wasn’t born in the Church, but I grew up in the Church,” he says. “My dad died when I was one. My mom at that time had just myself and my older brother. So, she was left with two small kids, no husband, and she was a stay-at-home mom, as well. She was like, ‘How am I going to do this? Why did God do this to me?’ She was searching for answers.” His mother’s journey to the truth was a profound influence on Mr. Khan. “At the funeral, she met someone from the Church, and he was trying to encourage her,” he recounts. “He gave her a booklet, and eventually, she started reading more, and in 2000 she decided to come to services. I was ten, and I had no clue what I was doing there. I was hanging out with other kids, playing during services, but the messages still kind of soaked in. I got baptized in 2014, and that’s when I officially became a member of the Church.”
Mr. Khan’s academic background is in architectural design. “I did my bachelor’s degree in Jamaica,” he says. “It was a bachelor’s in arts. Instead of just going straight into architecture, they taught me principles for design—and programs and software that you could use to make those designs a reality.” He then furthered his education by developing an expertise in project management. “I thought project management would be a nice addition to architecture,” he says, “because I was going into the construction field. I went to Canada to do my master’s in project management, and eventually got a job and applied for permanent residency there. They granted me permanent residency, so I stayed there for almost a decade until I moved here.”
Mr. Khan’s career path took a turn not long after Mr. Heykoop’s did. “Alex Heykoop left Canada to come over here,” Mr. Khan recalls, “so there was a job opening at [the Church’s Canadian Regional Office]. I applied for it, and that’s when they hired me. I always wanted to work with the Church, because it’s something that I am fully convicted of, something that’s my core belief, rather than something that’s just for a paycheck.”
Mr. Khan now attends the Charlotte congregation with his wife, Christina, and with their four children. His role within Television and Digital Media involves work on various projects, from still images for the Tomorrow’s World magazine to creating graphics for the telecast. “I also do the production of the Whiteboards,” he says. “After it’s been recorded, they send the audio file to me, and then Dalton Mooney and I actually sit down with Mrs. Rachel Keesee to see if we can storyboard it,” a process in which a visual outline of a production is created using a series of images. “Then,” Mr. Khan says, “I’ll take the storyboard and make all the graphics for it.”
Mr. Khan is continually seeking to improve the quality of the productions in which he’s involved. “If you watch the Whiteboards, there’s a slight change,” he notes, explaining that they are now being produced with a different editing software that is more capable of high-quality graphics. “I’m trying to keep the same style,” he says. “It’s not a different product from what we’ve been producing, but just a bit more refined.” He also looks for ways to make the content more engaging. “I’ve been designing infographics for the Whiteboards,” he says, “so they follow a single graphic that you can move around in and try to understand the whole topic from. I’ve been creating downloadable infographics as well.”
Mr. Khan’s passion for graphic design goes back to his childhood. “When I was young, before I went to study architecture in university, I always messed around with Photoshop,” he says. “It was like a hobby to me, using these programs to try and create something. I think that has carried over to what I do now. It’s fun to me.”
With how vitally important television and digital media are to the Work, we’re glad to have Mr. Heykoop and Mr. Khan contributing their considerable skills and diligent efforts to preaching the Gospel to the world. Please continue to pray for Headquarters as the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s Great Commission to His Church continues to march forward!