How Flexible or Centralized Should Seventh-day Adventist Communication Be?

Perhaps you’ve heard the adage which says that, at an academic or professional event, the most important thing is often not what happens in the official program. Rather, the crucial element, it theorizes, is the unplanned talks in the hall, the casual networking encounters, and those random moments of conversation that may spark an idea, trigger an initiative, or provide feedback about an issue or challenge.

The 2024 Global Adventist Internet Network (GAiN) Europe Conference in Budva, Montenegro, held November 15-19, was no exception to this adage. Around 280 Seventh-day Adventist communication and media professionals and church leaders from across Europe met for the annual forum and training event, triggering conversations that reflected on current communication challenges and suggested a way forward.

Those often informal chats sought to envision how Adventist communication will face the future, deal with the changing media landscape, and embrace or disengage from current approaches, all for the sake of furthering Adventist mission.

Moving toward Centralization

The current model of communication and media in an online-first environment demands a thorough knowledge of how search engines and algorithms work, explained Sam Neves, associate communication director of the General Conference. Neves, who has studied the topic for years, proposes a system that favors a single central repository that may allow an exponential increase in the Adventist digital footprint.

“Unfortunately, the Adventist media landscape is highly fragmented,” Neves explained, which is not good if you want your organization or ministry to appear on the first pages of an online search engine. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Adventist sites competing for the same space, with redundancies and overlapping, which is highly inefficient, he said.

Neves did not decry fragmentation in itself. “As regards social media, fragmentation is the way to go,” he conceded. Given that social media is based on different parameters than other media, the more fragmented you are in your approach, the wider your reach will be.

To make his case for greater centralization, Neves shared the journey of other denominations who combine all their publications and postings under one single official brand. “It’s no wonder those [faith communities] are well above Seventh-day Adventists as regards the priority [that] algorithms assign to their publications and ministries,” he said.

The benefits for mission would be multiple, Neves emphasized, as a more significant online presence would help seekers to connect with the Adventist message easily. “Instead of ending up in other pages which may promote a non-biblical message, people asking for answers to spiritual questions could get acquainted with the Adventist message and eventually connect with a digital evangelist,” he said.

Competing Forces and Countercurrents

While Neves seems to have a point, the reality on the ground is multi-layered and more nuanced, several Adventist communication leaders said. On the sidelines of the GAiN event in Montenegro, a group shared their thoughts with Adventist Review, the 175-year-old flagship church publication that is itself in the process of assessing and reimagining its operations in the light of new technological developments and changing public preferences.

Most of those who advanced their opinions asked that their names not be shared so they could discuss the topic candidly and freely.

“I think comparing the Adventist Church to other faiths regarding the centralization of communication is tricky,” one leader said. “Adventism goes much further, deeper, and wider than other denominations. It’s an increasingly complex system, with thousands of institutions and ministries encircling the globe. Some of them are official church entities, but many others are lay-led supporting ministries. All of them are engaged in Adventist mission at a different pace, in various contexts, and with extremely different target audiences. To think that you can put them all together in a one-size-fits-all bag is counterproductive to mission.”

A second communication leader agreed. “Besides God’s ongoing blessings, one of the reasons Adventism is alive and keeps moving forward is … its God-given ability of re-imagining and re-creating itself to reach all kinds of audiences, from the non-Christian to the atheist to the unchurched,” he said. Adventist inventiveness depends on this relatively wide net of people committed to a cause in a local or niche setting, he emphasized.

The same leader referenced, as an example, an initiative of the Adventist Church in Austria, which premiered at the GAiN event in Montenegro. In it, a group of media creatives produced a video that shares in a couple of minutes the 28 Adventist beliefs in a way never done before.

“That superb production probably doesn’t make much sense in church regions where post-Christian and secular audiences are not a sizable chunk of the population,” he said, citing its extremely fast pace, cutting-edge graphics, and symbol-based approach. “It’s a finely targeted production.”

Carlos Magalhaes, director of digital strategies for the Novo Tempo TV network in Brazil, seemed to agree. Magalhaes promoted the Feliz7Play streaming network service during the GAiN event in Montenegro. The streaming service, based in Brazil, produces original movies, series, or animated options that are released every Friday. “I must, however, express a word of caution,” he told Adventist communicators. “Some of the content we produce includes cultural elements that may not be suitable for your audiences [in other parts of the world]. They are more locally or regionally oriented.”

And what about the mission potential of centralization? “Right now, in my country, sharing anything ‘official,’ especially from our [General Conference] headquarters in the US, is counterproductive to mission,” another communication leader explained. “The content we share is mission-driven and mission-minded but focused on our local context. In that sense, any article or media production placed in a central repository under the official church brand is an item lost,” he said.

In Search of Balance

In such a seemingly contradictory environment, some Adventist communicators believe that the answer to this tension between centralization and localization may be closer to a mid-point between competing options. “Flexibility, not hegemony, is the key,” one of them said. “An overall brand focus which allows for unique ways of tackling communication realities in local contexts — that is the answer.”

There’s at least one key reason for striving to find that balance, the same communication leader emphasized. “At the end of the day, whatever we do should be measured against the ultimate question that every Adventist Christian must answer, which is, ‘How is my office, department, or ministry — my corner in the world — helping fulfill the church’s mission of sharing the gospel in a way that may usher in the second coming of Jesus?’ ”