28 September 2012 Silver Spring, Maryland, United States [Tor Tjeransen, tedNEWS] Seventh-day Adventist media experts from around the world recommend greater cooperation between media professionals to maximise effectiveness in communicating the gospel.
A group of eighty Adventist media professionals from all regions of the world were called together at the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s world headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA last week for a Global Media Communication Summit. The five-day meeting took place after an initiative by pastor Ted N. C. Wilson to gather a cross-section of creativity and experience in communication to explore ways to maximise the effectiveness of the Seventh-day Adventist communication to the world. In his keynote address, president Wilson expressed his desire for the meeting to “be a catalyst for the church and the world to wake up to the soon coming of Christ.”
The Seventh-day Adventist Church operates a huge communication network using every possible technology, but there is a tendency for communication offices to work independently. Vice President at the World Church headquarters, pastor Ben Schoun, was responsible for the organisation of the meetings. Pastor Schoun stressed that the purpose of the meetings was to “learn how to work together so that we can accomplish things that we can not do individually.”
At the outset of the meetings Mrs Joanne Davies, a lay-member with many years of experience from the advertising industry in New Zealand, gave a passionate plea for greater co-operation between media professionals within the church. “The Seventh-day Adventist brand has been dwarfed, and no-one oversees the strategic resource allocation,” Mrs Davies asserted and formulated her dream for greater impact in this way: “Let us put media muscle behind our message.”
Participants listened to presentations on a wide range of issues relating to communicating Adventist beliefs and values as a background to group work on ideas for greater co-operation and effectiveness. Pastor Claude Richli, Associate Publisher of the Adventist Review, gave a presentation on overt and covert branding. Richli reminded participants that the Seventh-day Adventist Church has one of the strongest brands in the world. “There are more Seventh-day Adventist church buildings in the world branded with our logo than McDonald’s and Subway have combined,” he said. In addition to this overt branding Adventist values and doctrines are being communicated by church members in ways that are not clearly marked as Seventh-day Adventist. Richli pointed out that both types of communication are necessary and said the covert branding is the only way to get our message across in many areas of the world.
A measure of the scale of Adventist communication is the fact that Adventist World Radio have 20 million downloads of their various pod-casts each month. Even with this kind of statistics Adventist communicators want to do better.
Miroslav Pujic, Communication and Media Ministries Director of the Trans-European Division, said there is a “need to harness technology in a way that is even more effective for the communication of the Gospel to the world.”
In addition to pastor Pujic, Frederick Duval, tedMEDIA Productions filmmaker, and Tor Tjeransen, Media Director of the Norwegian Union, participated from the Trans-European Division.
Recommendations from the Global Media Communication Summit will be brought to the annual meeting of the Executive Committee of the global Seventh-day Adventist Church, which will take place in mid-October. [tedNEWS]
tedNEWS Staff: Miroslav Pujic, director; Deana Stojkovic, editor
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