Christian music hits northern airwaves
WHITEHORSE, YT�"Tara Janiga is only 12 years old, but she's already one of the regular deejays for the very first Christian radio station to broadcast in Canada's north.
NewLife FM hit the airwaves at the beginning of January, broadcasting at 50 watts to Whitehorse and surrounding community. Janiga is one of 45 volunteers staffing the fledgling station housed in a chapel built by inmates at the Whitehorse Correctional Institute.
"We have a radio station that looks like a church, with a steeple on it and a cross and the works," laughs Don Green, one of a core group that first began talking about starting a station three years ago. "It's kind of neat."
The institute abandoned the building several years ago, so they donated it to the station, who had it moved and renovated. "It's put us pretty much into first class studios right off the bat," says Green.
And now, proclaims Janiga's father, Gregg, "the airwaves in Whitehorse are being saturated with the good news!"
It was in 1999 when Janiga says he "received an impression from God" that he was to help establish a radio station in the city of 23,000. With his partner Rod Carty, he formed New Horizons Christian Broadcasting, organized a committee of six men and started to pray.
Most of the volunteers, including Green, a meteorologist, and Janiga, an elevator technician, had no background in radio. "When we were first talking about this, we realized we didn't know anything about what we were getting into," Green admits.
"The learning curve has been very steep," agrees Janiga.
Six months after the initial meeting, the group contacted Prescott Sandhu, general manager of a Christian radio station in Prince Rupert, B.C. Sandhu came to Whitehorse and offered his services as a consultant, filling out the applications and engineering information.
"I think that saved us years of timing. Just learning the ropes would have taken that long," says Green. The group received official approval from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in October 2001 and spent the next year raising funds, learning technology and finding the building.
At present the station's volunteers span about seven different denominations and nine or 10 churches. Even Janiga's two children are in on the venture�"Tara, 12, hosts "Jesus Loves Me," an hour-long program for preschoolers and their parents five days a week while Matthew, 13, hosts a weekly Christian rock program.
But the plan is to eventually operate with a paid staff, says Green. Relying on volunteers has "really involved the community and given people opportunities they wouldn't have had. But, when you're dealing with volunteers, you're always just kind of 'a month away from being out of business,' if somebody moves or gets sick and they don't have the time."
With paid staff, "we can be more professional in what we do and train up some of the volunteers that are really excited about what they're doing now and employ them."
In the future, the station will offer its own news broadcasts and live talk programs. They would also like to expand their signal, says Green.
"We've had a number of the outlying communities request our signal, so we're going to be looking at ways to get our signal to them, whether it's by phone lines or satellite or Internet, we don't know yet.
"This has been a project where we've really seen God's provision," he adds. "The people, the building, there's a million little things that happened along the way that you could just see the finger of God was on it from the beginning.
"Even though we don't know what we're doing, God does. Which is why we've been able to do what we've done."
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