Winnipeg-based evangelist Willard Thiessen admits to having deeply mixed emotions about his decision to sell Vancouver’s faith-based NOWTV to Rogers Broadcasting.

Trinity Television, Thiessen’s family-owned not-for-profit charitable organization, had launched the station in August 2001. But almost from the start, it suffered significant financial losses.

“We didn’t have enough depth of pocket to keep it going, to take it to the line we needed to take it to. And that was a huge disappointment,” he says.

Yet in approving the sale, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is requiring Rogers to maintain NOWTV’s current religious programming schedule, including its flagship program “It’s a New Day.”

The Toronto-based media giant has also contracted to buy from Trinity $500,000 worth of programming a year for seven years.

And that, according to Thiessen, opens doors for Christian broadcasting in Canada that no one could have imagined four years ago.

“We’ve got the opportunity of working out our faith in a real broadcast world and hopefully continue to influence our country in a positive way in a cooperative relationship with a major media player,” he says.

The assets bought by Rogers for $13 million include a licence to operate a Christian television station in Winnipeg that the CRTC granted Trinity nearly three years ago.

However Trinity was never in a financial position to implement the liscence. Rogers now hopes to have that station up and running by the fall of 2006.

The decision also allows Rogers to rebroadcast NOWTV into Victoria.

Leslie Sole, CEO of television for Rogers Broadcasting, says most of the immediate changes they are planning for the station will take place behind the scenes.

“It needs investment in programming,” he says. “Considering the resources that they had, I think they’ve done a reasonable job. But there’s a long way to go in terms of developing a broad-based audience.”

Sole believes that purchasing “a spiritual station” at this time is simply good business.

“We sense—and there’s research to prove—that through the ’80s and ’90s it looked like the churches would be empty. And quite frankly, that’s not true,” he says.

“It’s a more personal spirituality, but it’s also a little more public at the same time. And it’s including itself in people’s life decisions a lot more than people thought.”

Thiessen regrets that the Christian business community, which Trinity had approached initially about investing in NOWTV, did not catch that same vision.

“Rogers, right from the beginning, saw the value in this,” he says. “And we were frustrated that the Christian big businesspeople we went to did not see it. It was very tough on us and very disappointing.”

(Trinity had permission from the CRTC to turn NOWTV into a for-profit company that sold shares. But that approval came too late to save it from being sold.)

Thiessen adds the fact that Rogers clearly believes it can make money from religious programming is proof of NOWTV’s viability.

“I don’t think we’re a failure,” he says, “because our audience in Vancouver has supported us. The business community has voted for NOWTV by advertising on it.”

But Ned Vankevich, who teaches communications at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., is skeptical.

“The primary reason they’ve had financial problems is because that support wasn’t there from the Christian community,” he says. Unless more Christians start supporting NOWTV, Rogers could start relying more on the other faith groups that the CRTC requires be allotted airtime on the station, he adds.

“[The people at] Rogers are no dummies. They do their homework, so they must see something in the marketplace. However, what that marketplace is and how they’ll shape it, that’s yet to be seen,” he says.

Yet Thiessen insists if anyone has failed, it is Trinity—because it could not realize its dream of impacting Canada’s television landscape as a religious broadcaster.

“It isn’t that we’ve lost the dream completely,” he says. “It’s just taken on a very different form than what we had ever anticipated four years ago.”