How technology is powering Ministry – Brent Hardinge

Hey, Adam, have you heard about AIM? Oh, AIM, yeah. I used to use this in college. AOL Instant Messenger.

Well, I use that once upon a time, too, and that's great nostalgia. But what I'm actually talking about is the Adventist Information Ministry. That's what I'm wondering about. Have you heard about that?

I have heard of that. Now, that makes more sense that you would bring that up in this context. As much as I'd love to reminisce about the sound that AIM made whenever you'd message someone on there, it's probably not really relevant to what we're doing here today. Very true, very true.

I had heard about them before we did this episode as well. See, the interesting thing is like up until 2021, these guys have been operating as the call center for ministries in the North American division. And I had no idea how deep their history was. And so in doing this episode, I really enjoyed digging a little bit into that history and what what they're doing.

We operated almost solely as the contact center for the North American Division for Media Ministries. So we worked with, you know, it is written in Voice of Prophecy, with the Hope Channel, with 3DN, and many others as the call center. So we've been here on the campus of Andrews University for 43 years, employing students, but they get the opportunity of being the front lines of the church. to represent the church in this media space. That's great that they've been so integral to what our church has been doing for so long.

But what's been happening recently? Well, since about 2021, they shifted gears and they started working with digital ministry as well, not just as a call center. And it was actually very interesting to chat to Brent Harding. His leadership there and the innovative things that they're doing is really transformative to ministry.

And I think we're going to be seeing their work become a lot more prominent in the upcoming years. And so this conversation that we have with Brent, I found to be super interesting. Let's get into that interview. Hello everyone and welcome to the Blue Vineyard Podcast.

My name is Adam Weeks and boy have we got a guest for you. Luke, do you want to share with us a little bit about what we're going to be talking about today? Yeah, absolutely. So our guest today is Brent Harding.

And Brent came on to my radar. Oh, I don't know. It was it was a number of years ago, but I've watched what he has done. And here's one of these guys that are working in this technology space in the Adventist Church behind the scenes.

He's done everything from being on the tools, building the websites and doing the things, but also going up and working in the communication, working at the NAD and GC levels and doing a bunch of different things. But we're going to be talking primarily about his current role and we're going to be talking about online evangelism and Adventist connected. We're going to go into a bunch of places, but Brent, before we jump down all of those rabbit holes, I'd love to start by just getting a little bit of your, your trajectory. So just to start us off, could you share like, what are some of the early choices that you made that set this really interesting trajectory for your career?

Certainly. Thank you for having me on. It's good to see you guys, Luke and Adam. I appreciate what you guys do as well.

Early choices. I grew up as a child of a minister. My life was shaped by the work that my father did and my mom as well. We moved around a lot.

I've lived in a little bit of all over the US, East Coast, West Coast. now in the Midwest, but also overseas as well. Spent some time as a young child over in Asia, and then went back again in college and spent a year as a student missionary in Nepal. I have always had an interest in technology, came home from - From high school from my senior year of high school and my my dad said hey I want to show you this internet thing and Prior to that I had I really had no knowledge. I had some classmates that were talking about some things on the internet I really didn't know what it was knew something was out there and I came home and he had this big HTML 3.2 Bible that he had gone down and gotten from a bookstore.

And so he's like, let me show you this. And so we were flipping through that really was formulative for me in starting me into the career that I have had. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm so glad he did that because now we get the benefit of your leadership and what you are currently doing at the NAD.

I'd love to, before we get too much further, if you could kind of briefly describe kind of what your role is and what you're doing at the NAD. I'm working with the ministry called Adventist Connect. We just renamed this year. So for those who have been in the church space and particularly a lot of pastors who have come through Andrews University, they will have known it as Adventist Information Ministry, or AIM.

So AIM has been around for 43 years. We started back in the early 80s, really up until What would this be? 2021, we operated almost solely as the contact center for the North American Division for Media Ministries. So we worked with, you know, it is written in Voice of Prophecy, with the Hope Channel, with 3AVN, and many others. as the call center. So when the number comes up on the screen says call this number to request your free Bible study or request your free offer, probably 99% of the time those phone calls come to us.

We've been here on the campus of Andrews University for 43 years, employing students. And both undergrad and graduate school, many times they are theology students, but often they are not. So we have business majors, we have health sciences, we have architecture students, aviation students, really across the gamut. But they get the opportunity of being the front lines of the church. to represent the church in this media space.

So over the last three years, we have really taken and expanded what we do. And really, our focus is zooming in on supporting the local church even more specifically. We have always been here as a ministry to support the church, particularly through the media ministries. But now in this digital age, everything gets really even more focused through social media and through digital tools.

We're working on making sure that our churches and schools in North America have the tools and the support that they need to be able to engage with their communities. That's such a huge like that's such a broad thing. Is that it? I mean, I know it's a it's an organization that's been around for a really long time, but you mentioned that really it was occupying a fairly specific segment of exactly like what the activities were until 2021.

So was it was that shift intimidating to go from saying we're doing this one fairly specific thing to doing all of these things in this category? There's always a level of intimidation to do something new. Yeah. And I came from really a different area of work, really more straight up communication where you're focusing on one or two.

I say one or two is always more than one or two, but, you know, some very specific projects and specific websites in general. I mean, in to be exact, I told and you know, my wife and I talked about this as we were starting to consider coming here and. I realized, like, I'm not interested in doing, like, one thing and, you know, maintaining something that has been this way forever and just, you know, continuing to go. I feel like I've been given the gift and the desire to see things change and to see things improve.

You know, change for change sake is not worth it, but change to improve the mission and to improve the work that's happening. Absolutely. And so, yes, it's intimidating, but on the other hand, that's why I'm here. And that's the way that I feel like God has wired me to be able to try and seek to improve things.

And really, for me, it's focusing around the mission of why we're here as a church. There are amazing tools and amazing technology that we have. If we just live in the past, we're not gonna get to make use of those things. And I think these technologies and tools and the internet and all of the technology and things that go around that, I think is given to us for this time.

It's not just to... you know, be able to talk like this, which is amazing. And I love I love the being able to do this, but it gives us the ability to communicate to the community and to reach people that we are not able to reach as well without using those tools. Wow, that's cool. Thank you.

There's there's so many things that you your office and what you touch. in the NAD and around the world, just so many cool things. There's one thing in particular that is near and dear to my heart, a little backstory. So as a former school principal and self-proclaimed nerd, I often got, hey, Adam, we need help with a school website. I'd say, all right, sure, show me what you got.

And I literally remember coming up one time. There was a school that I was working at and the school website had the little like gears I think they must have been with that flash like a little spinning gears and you know, it was And an Adventist school connect very similar to Adventist Church connect I kind of got into that figuring that out and I was able to make something that was reasonable like all right here is This this feels pretty good but there was still a lot more that I wanted to be able to do it was limited and From what I know, and if you could give some backstory, there is a big transition with Avena School Connect, Church School Connect. This is the program where all of our churches and all of our schools have been offered a free website. Hey, here's your website for your school or your church.

Here is a way to make those changes. Go and do. But there's a big shift to WordPress. Could you tell us, yeah, a little bit about that and where that is in the process?

Yeah, absolutely happy to happy to talk about that Adventist Church and School Connect has been around for about 18 years It has gone through several different iterations started out as with the vision of we need a web presence for every church and school and At that point it wasn't as easy as it is now to build a website. I've been involved with website building, but I know it's only in the last few years that it's really been what I would consider a commodity. Anyone can go out and spin up Squarespace or Wix or WordPress.com or any number of other tools and build some absolutely amazing and stunning websites. But at that point, it was... literally to do this, it was like hand coding and writing the HTML and making your graphics and doing your CSS from scratch many times.

So this would be early 2000s where things were starting to get a little better and there was more programming involved. It was becoming a little more widespread, but some people recognized that we really needed to put our churches online. And with 7,000 churches in North America, how do you do that at scale? And so they started building what were some very simple websites that have since progressed into what is now the Adventist Church Connect and Adventist School Connect system.

We recognized a few years ago that we needed to make a shift and the division felt that this was important. This is something that we see as critical for our churches to be in the 21st century, and our schools as well, to have websites that are inviting, that are informative, and that are easy to use for our teachers, our pastors. They're not web experts, and most... of those organizations don't have the budget to bring in these amazing experts like you guys. We want to make sure that that works well and that it's something that we're proud of when we look at our sites.

So a choice was made, a decision was made at that point that we were going to move to WordPress. We have basically two flavors of sites. One is the basic sites and one is the advanced sites. So the basic sites are essentially a one-page summary of the organization.

So it's pulling data out of eAdvenist, which is our membership system in North America. It pulls the church name, of course, church address. It will pull service times out of there. If someone wants to put a streaming URL in, like a YouTube or a Facebook URL, they can put that in there.

And then it pulls the pastor's information and some basic contact information. It puts all that together with links and an image of the church if we have that. that becomes the church website. It has, you know, some basic descriptions about the Adventist Church and links to Bible studies linked to like more on our beliefs. But really, it is it is a one page placeholder site that is there in case the church wants it.

Does the local church have access to it or is that just there and they don't have to do anything? So it's there. They don't have to do anything if they if they want to do something completely different they just put a different URL into the eAdventus system and We redirect to that website, whatever that is If they want something more and they don't want to go, you know to that effort of building something else themselves There's a link in the bottom. They can say upgrade my site and fill out a form, we review that, confirm some things, and then we will generate a new website for them that replaces that single page site for them.

That's where WordPress comes in. So in the new system that we're just getting ready to, we're just starting to roll out, I think we have like 20 sites on there right now. We have some basic content, again, there, a little more content. There's a few pages, but...

With this system, they're able to build any number of things. They can completely rewrite any of the content. We encourage them to put up their own pictures, make the site their own so that when someone browses through the site, comes to the site, they know what the church is like. That's the basic overview of kind of where things are at at this point.

Got it. Well, do you have like when this is rolling out like when are people gonna be able to see this? Oh This is something that is is just starting to roll out right now In the coming in the coming weeks. We are I think we we spun up several sites today.

We have essentially Six thousand websites that were were migrating. So we took a big chunk off last fall By moving the basic sites from the old system over to the new one. That's basically the flip of a switch At some point, you know, it obviously takes some work to develop it But at one point you just kind of flip the switch and the next you know the next moment Once the DNS and everything resolves you're looking at the new the new system. We have Approximately four thousand sites left to go Um, so not too many, you know, just, you know, an afternoon's work right there.

So we are hoping to get those, um, began migration on, on that in a major way soon. How much is the team that's working on doing this, by the way? We have, we have two teams. We have an outside contracting organization that we've brought in to write the software.

They do a lot of the QA. And obviously, the software development, they've done the design. So we have five themes that are being released with the system right now. We've got a couple more that are coming, but they're not quite done.

And then, let's see, internally, I think we've got two students working with us. We have one full-time support, and then I have an associate director and myself. That's just on the website platform, which we call Frame. So we're renaming Adventist Church and School Connect to Frame.

That's the team internally that is working on that. I was just gonna, Adam, feel free to jump in if you were going somewhere with that line of questioning. But the next thing that I was just curious about, because really, well, actually, before I go there, is there any way if someone wanted to have a look at examples of this, is there some way that people can go and look and learn more and see examples as yet? Or is it just, or is that still coming somewhere?

So definitely a lot more is coming. If you want to look at our website, AdventusConnect.org, we built that on frame. It is using a slight variation of one of the themes that we've modified a little bit to do some specific stuff for us. But basically, it is the exact same system, same plugins, everything that is available for any site at this point.

I don't do a ton of web development myself at this point, unfortunately. And over the last month, I got to dive in with this. And I was like, you know what? this. I want to build out our own site.

So I worked with one of the designers that we have here. We went through and the team, the outside contractor built the theme itself for us. And they basically did one page. And then from there, I just kind of took that and got to go through the process of building a site ourselves.

And I had a lot of fun doing it. I really was impressed with the variety and the different options that are available. For the WordPress nerds, this is using a page builder experience that is the really built-in core WordPress with the Gutenberg and block editor and that interface. We took some time during the development over the last year and a half to really evaluate what's the best way to do this moving forward.

After looking at what the options were, we really felt just doubling down on WordPress core itself. You know, there's a lot of other things that can be done with, there's a lot of other builders, but we felt like just trying to stick as close to core as possible would be good. And at this point, you know, so far it's, it's paying off. We, we ended up building. all of our themes essentially from scratch, because we wanted to make sure that users could change between themes and not lose content, not lose... access to parts of their site when they did that.

All of the blocks are common across all of the themes. So they're going to look a little different in each of the themes, but they are all designed to work in all of the themes. So it's been a fun experience to go through this process. So first off, I want to say Thank you for this effort.

In my opinion, this is a true gift to the Adventist Church. I am a fan of WordPress, both from a technical aspect and a philosophical aspect. And I'm curious, what are you most excited about this move to WordPress? Is there anything that like...

This isn't a small thing. Is there a time you ever second guess yourself? Should we really go with WordPress? How is this going to benefit our church?

I'd love to hear what are you excited about with this change? I think anyone who's doing anything big will always second guess themselves. And sometimes that comes daily. On the other hand, I don't question the value in what we're doing.

I think that this was the right thing to do. And I am thrilled that we could do this and that I could be involved in the project and in the process of doing this. Any technology that you choose, there's going to be ups and downs. And if you have lived in the WordPress world for any amount of time over the last 12 months, you know that there's been some ups and downs.

And yet, this is something that I feel like was the right decision for what we needed. to be able to build this in a way that is completely owned by the church. We were licensing software before. It's a major investment, both in time and finances. This is something that is completely owned by the Adventist Church and is available for us to use as we need to use it.

We'll continue making investments in this as we go forward. getting to see sites come out that are engaging and have the tools. Now it's up to people to put the content in and to make it themselves and to make it feel like that church. We're now at the point where we can start to roll out new sites and we can start migration, which is a huge headache, honestly, to move from a... from an old system into a new one and how do you match themes, you know, old themes to new themes and figuring out where all the crazy corners are, where things are hidden. That is something that we keep uncovering new things every day. things take longer than you anticipate.

We're going through that process and I feel like we're in a good position to get this, you know, to be moving forward. All of this is going to be hosted on the North American Division's data center. It's an investment that the division has made over the last years, not just for this project, obviously. Seeing the value of having our own infrastructure and being able to do that has been a key thing. a key part of the information technology department at the division.

And they've made an investment in that. We are now at the point where we can start moving. I mean, all of the infrastructure for this new system is on that system. We're able to move forward with that.

And it's fun to get to see it come to life as we've been working on it for almost two years now. That data center is... Is at an incredible scale like just having a look at what's publicly available information on that one of one of my business partners owns a hosting company and I was showing him and he and he was just so blown away that the church has something of that caliber in in the arsenal and that's that's really it's a really impressive thing. I was gonna say that you know on on that point of owning the hardware and having a data center.

I imagine for many people sitting in the pews on the average, you know, Sabbath morning, having a sense of our church doing this kind of a thing isn't part of their world at all. Like, oh yeah, I go to church and I'm glad the church has a website and these types of things. But I imagine that most people are unaware of the investment that our church has made. in communication. And when you think about what we are asked to do as Seventh-day Adventists, that's kind of the thing that we do.

We have communication, telling the story, that's the thing. So again, thank you for the work that you are doing in that. Absolutely. It's a privilege to get to do it.

On the point of that communication aspect of it, of telling the story, with what you're doing with Adventist Connect, it's not just, I see the website as like a mid or lower funnel. Activity right like it but by the time someone comes to the website they've got a reason to be there usually but you guys also deal with the like further up the funnel as well you know in the in the online evangelism space you know obviously in the history there's the call center aspect to it I was I was looking up you know things that you've written and talks that you've done in the past and I heard you mention a project that you did with the central California. churches as far as this online advertising in order to do evangelism. And I just was hoping you'd be able to share a little bit of that story, because I thought that was super interesting. Yeah, absolutely.

That's been a that's been a really fun, fun experiment, a fun project to take on that is still growing. to this day. We started, I think it would have been about two years ago, with the idea of saying, we have this technology, we've got social media, we've got very targeted advertising that we can do. How can we really make that part of the evangelism picture of a church? How can we make that part of the outreach of the church?

And it wasn't just us. We had a group from the GC. as well as the conference at all kind of the the three of our organizations came together went wow we're like both all three of us are thinking about the same things and how do we how do we dig into this so we went into this together to try and see where where we could go the GC previously had done some experimenting during COVID of, you know, how do we get the most engagement with people? They tried ads on health, they tried ads on prophecy, on Bible study, on additionally ads on prayer. And like, hands down, the ads on prayer had the highest response of anything.

So we said, why can't we... take ads on prayer and figure out how to leverage that into a connection to the local church. The way it works is put up an ad asking people if they have prayer requests. Who doesn't have prayer requests? Really across the board doesn't matter on religion.

Even non-religious people will engage as they feel like they could use prayer as well, even if it's not them praying, if someone is praying for them. adds with prayer, do a fairly immediate response. So within a few minutes, having somebody there to respond in real life, praying for them, but also encouraging them. And then there's the final portion or the next portion, I guess, is the follow-up. So coming back tomorrow, coming back in a week and saying, how's it going?

We've been praying for you. Here's some verses. Here's some encouragement. you were asking for prayer about a surgery for a loved one, how are they doing? And really it is showing people that you care, showing people that you remember them and that you recognize the needs that they have and that you're there to listen and show that you're ready to pay attention.

We started this with six churches, several of them in the Bay Area, San Francisco, Mountain View areas around there. And then we went out into the Central Valley, so more rural areas. Basically placing these ads, they're short ads, some of them were video ads, some of them were still ads. And honestly, when we got started, we almost stopped.

Starting out, we thought, okay, what would be the best way to do these ads? And so we built what we thought would work. And we put them out there. And they essentially flopped.

It was costing us, I think, upwards of $90, $95 per lead that we were getting out of these ads, which is completely ridiculous. And we said, no, this is not going to work. These ads, and we were starting to shift to try something different. And in the end, we ended up building, I think it was like 800 or 900 different variations of these ads.

And started to say, okay, this is getting reasonable. We were down in like the 12, 10, nine, eight dollar range. We went as low as I think three 50 and we're like, okay, now we're onto something. And within that short time that we ran the ads, which was about three months, we ended up generating, I think it was like four to 500 interests for these six churches that were people that were like telling their stories, just pouring out their hearts to a chat, you know, somebody on the other end.

And we thought initially, we've got this team of students here at Andrews, we'll just make use of them. There's so much we can do. And when somebody is ready to come to church, we'll just pass the interest to the local church at that point. And within...

I think it was two weeks on the first one. The lady, they had been chatting and she said, I'm ready to come to your church. Where will I meet you this week? And we went, whoa, wait a minute.

We're 2000 miles away. Like we can't do this. This has to be the local church as we've built this out. One of the different aspects that we can do and then there's different aspects that the local church has to do.

I can promise you within a month we can get over 300 interests in your local community. We've done this over and over with churches. The biggest problem, the biggest challenge right now is getting individuals in that church to respond. we can't get enough people to be able to respond to that many leads. And obviously, we want to make sure that if someone reaches out, we can respond to them, that we can care for them.

And so the list gets much smaller. We don't have to run ads as long, and we can still get great responses. But it's always a reminder to me that the harvest is great, the workers are few. And so we're always praying. praying to the Lord of the harvest to increase the workers, to give people a burden for reaching their community.

We have seen such amazing stories, things that happened. One lady who had been reaching out hadn't really connected well, and her son was in a terrible car accident. And as she's on the way to the hospital, she pulls open Facebook, pulls up the messenger. and sees right there is this church that is like her community church that is right there within five miles of where she drives on a regular basis. And she sees it sitting there in the inbox and she pulled it up and she says, these guys will pray for me.

And so 10 o 'clock at night, she writes in and says, please pray for me. We're on the way to the hospital. My son's been in a terrible car accident. And the church member, this was a local church member, saw the message, she got on there, she started praying for her, she wrote back, and then she set her phone down from Messenger, pulled out the phone part, and called the pastor.

And she said, Pastor, I don't know what you're doing right now. He was actually, he had just climbed into bed. And she said, I don't know what you're doing right now, but you need to get up, you need to get dressed, and you need to go down to the hospital. And so he did that.

He got up, he got dressed and he went down to the hospital and he showed up in the emergency room when they didn't have a church family and there he was able to be the church family that they didn't have and to pray with them and to be there in their time of need. We have seen over and over where churches have completely been transformed by you know, from being an insular organization, you know, oftentimes we go to church and there's our friends and it's comfortable and it's what we're used to, to shifting to being a community, a part of the community and understanding what the needs are of the community and helping the community to see what we as an Adventist church have to offer. in different ways. And so that's been really, really exciting for us to see this develop and to see this process grow as we have been trying this out. You know, we started in California and we've been, you know, we're doing things in Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington state.

We're looking at some, starting some in Canada. and, you know, several other states that we have projects starting. So it has, it has really been exciting to see how God is opening doors through this project to help engage the local church. That is so cool. Give me goosebumps.

Just like, yeah, we had something happen. I just have to thought of this story here. We support a website called A Picture of God. Um, this is the online Bible study that the North American division wrote.

It's a nonlinear study, so you can go any direction you want through the study, we have a live chat on there. And one day, a lady came on and she wrote, I'm looking for a church community where I can study the Bible. And one of our people here, he got on and he saw the message right away. And he said, hey, you know, what are you looking to learn?

You know, what would be helpful for you? And she responded, I'm just starting to read the Bible again. I really want help with this. And he said, OK, where are you located?

And she gave the city. And so he got online, and he found a church, and pulled open their website, called the pastor. miracle of miracles, the pastor picked up on the church phone number. And it's hard during the week to get people to answer, particularly in smaller churches where you don't have a church secretary all the time. But the pastor answered, and they talked for a few minutes.

He explained the situation, and he said, all right, I'm going to hang up, but I'm going to give her your number. Or actually, no, he had her number at that point. He said, I'm going to hang up. You call her back.

He said, you need to call her right away because she is interested. And they hung up. The pastor called back and they set up Bible studies and began studies that week. And six months later, Tyranny was baptized in that church.

And it was all because she came on the website. She typed in what she was looking for and someone was there to respond. And the pastor was there to respond. It's like from the wide end of the funnel, from why we're here to really focusing in on providing support and connecting her into a church community.

I love that. That's so cool. If someone who is listening to this is like, yep, I want to do that. I want my church to do that in ministry.

Where can they go to get that information through those best practices? Yeah, if you come to AvanisConnect.org, we've got all the information on there about what the ads are like, what the process is like, and then you can connect with us and we'll be happy to talk with you and work through the process with your church. So we've just launched the site on the new Frame platform, but we've got plans for putting out more resources around that. really a lack of resources on how to embrace and engage digital for churches. That's something that we're looking to really expand and share.

For us, yes, there is a cost to doing things. We're not in it to be making a profit or really making money on it. It is just to cover our costs. We're here to be a service to churches. our job is to connect people to the local church.

So whether that is coming in through social media ads, whether that is coming through some of the larger platforms like Adventist.org, Bible study platforms, social media platforms, whatever we can do, if we can connect people into a local church, that's fulfilling our mission of what we need to be here for. And as you put your future looking glasses on, what do you see coming down the line? What is ministry going to look like in the technology space anyway? What do you think that's going to look like in the next five to 10 years?

Where do you see it going? Ten years. That's a long ways out. I know I know that's why I said five I'm giving you the the out you can I think it's like I think it's like three to five maybe yeah before you could really predict anything You know AI is a huge thing and I don't know what that is gonna entail for the future.

I think it was only like What two years ago that chad gpt hit the scene. I know it was like 10 years before in the making It really became a a big thing at you know, just in the in the very recent past One of the most common questions that we get at the beginning of a conversation Is this ai? And you know people are guarded people are not sure what they're what they're engaging in what they're chatting with on the other end. I think AI is an amazing tool.

I think it's something that we can put in our toolkit. I use it almost every day for various things in my work. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't provide a human connection. And we live in a world that is so filled with digital and so devoid of personal connections.

And I feel like in a world of AI, the church has to be human to make that connection. This is a job that we've been given as humanity to share the gospel with the world. And we can't just outsource that to technology. absolutely have to use technology in whatever form it takes. So I don't know what AI is going to be like in two years, let alone a year.

I think that we absolutely have to lean into the human side of connection. That is what we were made to do as humans, is to connect in real life. The virtual connection is... is easy, and I think it's a tool that we absolutely have to use. In my neck of the world here, we get snow storms in the winter.

And my favorite time is when we get a really big storm and they haven't plowed yet, or it's too much snow that they can't plow yet, because that means that everyone's home. And the neighbors are coming outside Shovel the driveway to shovel out their cars or whatever is needs to happen. I have met so many people Through snowstorms that don't come out for any other reason because so often It seems like we drive to work and I do this. This is this is me.

This is my world I get up in the morning. I might go for a walk early in the morning, but I go home I take get my things ready for the day. I get in the car and I drive to work And then end of the day, I drive home, I drive back up to my house, I go into my house and I'm done. Like that's the end of the day.

I haven't seen a lot of community, even in my small community. We are able to reach into those spaces through digital in a way that is much, much harder. people don't knock on doors that much anymore. Getting into even an apartment complex, people are very leery when someone comes to the door. Even if it's someone you know, they're, why are you here?

Why didn't you call first? Why didn't you text me? But with social media, with texting, with the websites, we're able to get into those spaces that are really, really private. When someone has their phone, that's their device that they take everywhere with them.

And through these tools, we're able to get into that space in a way that is really hard to do with anything else. I think there are going to be new things that we have no idea about when it comes to technology. I'm excited about finding ways to use that technology for ministry and mission. I love that, you know, the frame of reference for AI, where technology fits, but it's human first, it's people first, and ideally, technology augments that help us to reach more people, do it faster, do it more efficiently, but it's people first.

One of the things that I think is this has been an ongoing debate as far as the local church versus the conference versus the union versus the NAD and all the different like, what do we need these layers of church for? And I love some of the work that you're doing that we're bringing out in this is that the work that you did for social media and best practices on prayer and like that's the way to connect with people. A local church doesn't have the resources to do that on their own. I think these are the things that make a good case for why we need to be a part of a worldwide church.

And I'm really grateful that you're doing that work. As we're starting to wrap up and kind of bringing these into more kind of a clear, is there anything that you could summarize as far as the value of what is happening at the NAD level, technological wise, the value of what you're doing there to the local church. I'm at a church and I want more people to come to my church. I wanna connect them in a digital way.

How would you summarize that? Technology to many people is a mystery. And there are things that we can do that the three of us here It's second nature to many church members. It is a black box and they have no idea how to even approach building a website or how do you make Facebook ads?

It's easy. It really doesn't take that much, but it takes some learning and it takes some experimenting and there's some things, we're an open book as far as what we do, but there's some things that we're able to do. that a local church can't necessarily do as well. You know, having a connection center that we operate here, where we're able to respond quickly to people, and that's really the first step in a successful engagement campaign. And I love that our organization is able to kind of take that off the table for the churches.

We're able to say, hey, we'll handle that first step. And as soon as you're ready, we can pass that interest to you, because the local church is where it needs to be. That is where those connections really happen. You know, we can start the conversations here, but we hand that off to the local church, and that's where the exciting things happen.

I love that we're able to kind of simplify the process by... doing what we do and letting the local church focus on what they do. And that is being personal, that is being the neighbors, that is being the hands and feet of Christ in that local community in a way that we can't do digitally. But we can do things that they can't do as easily. Anyone could do what we're doing, and I'd be happy to see more of it happen.

But there's some things that we can... help from both the Connection Center and the students that we have to do the work that we do, but also from the training side. And we're able to come alongside a church and help them train their members in how to have these conversations. You know, we're not talking about the weather. We're building or having a conversation in a way that heads in a direction.

And we want to make sure that we do that through these conversations. We have the training and we have the ability to come in and provide that training to others so that they can take these tools and make better use of them than we do. If we get to the point where we're no longer needed, I say, praise the Lord, because everyone's out there doing the work that they need to be doing. But until that time, I'm excited that Adventist Connect can be here to help the churches here in North America with this.

There you go. Thank you so much Brent. I really appreciate the time that you've spent We'll definitely put links to what you're doing in the in the show notes. So if anyone wants to learn more they can do that and Who knows we may have a part two sometime because I feel like there's a lot of different trails that we could go down next time around So each one was like a whole book like there's so much there.

Yes, absolutely Absolutely. I'd love to do it again. Thank you. All right, we will leave that there Thank you so much for joining us and listening to this episode if you've enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and we'll I look forward to seeing you guys for our next episode.