The Adventist Ecosystem Puzzle

Welcome to the Blue Vineyard podcast. This is a podcast for Adventist administrators and ministry leaders designed to help you navigate the growing Adventist digital ecosystem. We'll be having expert guests, but also sharing our own experience as we build and invest in platforms that will help the church in the digital space. Hey guys, welcome back to the Blue Vineyard podcast.

We're super excited that you are choosing to tune in with us today. We're going to be having a conversation with myself, Shanna, and with Luke. Hi. Yeah, hey.

The last time we were talking, we were mentioning this idea of the ecosystem. And that's kind of like a big and scary word. I don't know how you feel about that, Luke, but I feel like for me, it's taken a little bit of time to get around what that actually practically means. So yeah, talk to us today.

What are we going to be delving into in just a moment? The idea that I want to explore is obviously the Adventist ecosystem. And an ecosystem like at its root level, the fundamental level, it's a complex network of interdependent elements interacting with each other in order to maintain a balance within the system for the flourishing of all components. I just read that.

That's actually something that's written down. It was on the internet, so I trust it. Nice. We like it.

Basically, the reason that I'm thinking about this is because in our business in Blue Vineyard, we're looking at the Adventist ecosystem as a whole and asking questions around how we can improve that. And one of the first steps to being able to improve it or build it up is to understand it. And so that's a bit of a journey that I've been on over recent months, just trying to understand the ecosystem better so we can serve it better. And yeah, so I guess this is our opportunity to have a chat about it and just explore some of those ideas.

And I guess looking in the Adventist space from different angles that we have been doing, we're seeing lots of need, right? Especially in the digital space, to grow that and to improve that. And to be like one person, like, oh, I can solve all these problems. And realizing, well, actually, no, one person can't solve all these problems.

So how are we working together? Yeah, it's been a real eye-opener. It is. And from my perspective, I didn't expect this research or whatever you want to call it, I've been doing, I didn't expect it to necessarily become a history lesson.

But I was having a chat to Matt Lucio, the guy that runs the Adventist History Podcast for anyone. If you haven't heard that, I do recommend it. It's great. But I reached out to him and after I had done some thinking and some learning, I reached out to him and I asked him a question.

I said, at least the way I'm looking at it, it looks like the ecosystem of the church was kind of working pretty well in its early days. And then we kind of lost our way. Something broke, something happened. And, you know, in your understanding of the Adventist history, what was that?

And his response to me, I found it fascinating because he's like, well, slow down just a second. I don't think we lost our way so much as we were a victim of our own success, right? We created a church that was so capable of spreading into these other faraway global places in different cultures, different contexts, that the fragmentation was a necessary cost for the success that we had. Okay.

Just take us back a little bit. So what do you feel like was working well back in the early days? Because you said the ecosystem was working well back then. Do you have any practical examples of what you were seeing?

Yeah. What I found really interesting especially was that in the early times, despite the fact they didn't have phones, they didn't have internet, they didn't have any of the communication mediums that we do today, somehow this group of people all across North America were able to coalesce these ideas that were sound and everyone got onto the same page. It might have taken a long time and it did. You know, some of the doctrines as they were unearthed, it took a lot longer for them to be accepted generally.

But one way or another, they were accepted. And we came to this place where at the time, what we would now term the Adventist review was the main publication. And so people were using that as a way to make general statements and to call for help and for the church to make statements to its people. And the people cared at the lowest levels of the church.

The people cared deeply about what was going on at the global level or at the head level of the church. And this is another observation from Matt, by the way, that he was saying that that is something that has changed today because we have now reached a point of stability in most places. The general church member in any given location is far more likely to be interested in their own congregation rather than what's happening at the world church level. And that's not to say nobody is, but that is to say that it's no longer the priority for virtually everybody.

And because it's not the priority, even if the information is available, they're not paying attention to it. And so therefore these levels of fragmentation starts to occur. Yeah, that's fascinating because like, I'm just reflecting on that, like with the Adventist review and what was it called back then? The review on Herald and...

Yeah, the Adventist review. What was it called? Review on Sabbath Herald or whatever it was. Yeah, I think it had a number of names.

Yes, Adventist review on Sabbath Herald. That's the one. But yeah, people on, I think it was on the East Coast, the publishing house was, on the West Coast, people were like waiting for the literature. So they could be like, okay, where is the church up to?

What have you been finding? What's the open thinking happening there? And because there was that one source and it wasn't, you had the whole internet to explore and to research. You had that one reputable source where people were sharing what they were learning and praying through things and hearing from God and studying the scriptures and coming to these conclusions.

People were waiting and longing to be like, okay, so where is God leading the church now and believing in it in that whole picture? And you're right. Now it's like individual churches. Oh yeah, I found this cool thing, whatever, which is awesome.

We need to band together. But yeah, because it was small enough back then, there was that, I guess, more wholesome unity because of that. But yeah, there was something that happened, right? That changed that.

Yeah. And that was our success. Yeah, that was our success, right? So we started to open up the mission field in Europe and Australia and Africa and all these different places grew dramatically.

And so what was the logical thing that happened? Here in Australia, we started getting our church publications, things that make sense to us, right? So we have the Adventist record and we have the science publishing. We have these things that we know to be Australian publications.

And that was kind of one of these first steps in this fragmentation, which made complete sense because the people needed to be able to report and communicate in their own local areas. But that also, all of a sudden, there was not one single place or area of operations. It was this global thing that was going on. And so where I think it gets interesting for us, because we're talking about this strictly from the point of view of the digital space, I think the other factor that made this become a much more muddy situation to navigate is that there was an explosion of media, right?

There was radio came along and the church kind of got on board with radio and voice of prophecy, those sort of ministries came up and there was ways and means for the church to utilize that. TV came along and then we saw Hope Channel come out. We saw 3ABN and like this explosion of Adventist media in those places. And then the internet came along and the internet just turned it up to 11, right?

The internet made way for all of these channels that you could access information from based on your taste, right? Whether if you consider yourself to be more of a conservative person or you consider yourself to be more progressive or whatever label you want to hang on yourself, there's like an outlet that's just for you. And so we start getting these echo chambers in Adventism, partially due to what I said before, our success. We exist in a lot of different places and so therefore people will view us differently or view the global church differently from those places.

But the other thing is with so much data now available, so many people now able to speak into the space, then it becomes a bunch of these small decentralized voices rather than a unifying voice that people can go to. Yeah and like it makes total sense like what you were saying for it to be broken down into smaller segments and to try and work on that. But then you run into the problem with people not collaborating and like people having to reinvent the wheel and spend extra time and money on things that have been done in other places. Yeah, you're right, it just takes away some...

Oh sorry, I was just gonna say, now I think you're really hitting the nail on the head and that's kind of the problem that I'm seeing now because when I was talking to Matt, I was really struck by how much sense he was making on the point of this is not an optional thing, right? So the fragmentation, this reinvention of the wheel in whatever field or capacity that we're talking about really wasn't optional. If we're going to be successful in multiple places, we actually need a degree of this decentralization. Fully.

One person can't have full control the whole time. Exactly, exactly. The Mormon church does that right and they, if you're looking for a organization that does a really good job of centralizing that authority and control as far as their digital work goes, then they are the poster child for it and they have done a great job of that. But that also means, and this is also something else that Matthew pointed out, that means that their innovation is greatly limited because everything is prescribed, right?

This is the way we do it globally and so innovation can only happen in waterfall format from the top down, whereas our church, being so decentralized, has a great capacity for adaptation and innovation. And so we've got that. We should be able to play to that. But my hypothesis, what I'm saying, what we're saying in what we're trying to do is that while we agree with that in principle, there are some things that we simply don't need to reinvent the wheel on.

If there was a central place where we could find out, okay, we're trying to find a tool to do, fill in the blank, whatever that might be, a new tithe processing platform online or a literature evangelism dashboard for different programs or event software for running Adventist camp events, these kinds of things, if they are created and done in a positive way in one location, why would we want to spend... Why are we doing it again? Yeah, why would we duplicate that? And that is costing a lot of money for people in each area to produce.

And so, yeah, why aren't we using those across spaces? Yes. And so that kind of, I guess that kind of brings us up to present day. And so that was one of the things that we hope to do.

So, I mean, we provide some services in that, but ultimately, I think at the root of what we're trying to do is to connect the Adventist organizations that we want to serve with the best solutions for them. So if we know of a great platform that's doing a certain thing that is in South America and there is a conference that is in Africa that's trying to achieve that, well, then maybe we can connect those dots and help those people do that. So I think this is one of the beauties of the internet, this age of technology that we're in is that we're able to do that. And so this led me a few months ago to start a database.

So every time I found an Adventist focused product or service in the digital space, I started adding it to a database and I started reaching out to people and saying, hey, this is, I'm building this database, you know, who should be on it? What should be this? Who should be that? And it is slowly growing.

And I continue to be amazed at how many of these providers that I'm finding that I didn't even know about. I continue to even find people that are in my own conference or in my own area that I just wasn't aware of before. And so as I'm building this out, I'm hoping this will become a resource that will be really helpful to administrators who are trying to find someone to do a certain thing or a product to help with a certain problem. If we can create a database that's specifically in this category.

So if I take a step back, talking about the ecosystem, coming back to our initial conversation, the ecosystem of the world, the Adventist movement worldwide, it has probably three or four main categories of entity in it. There are the official church organization categories and that would be, you know, general conference, divisions, unions, local conferences, local churches. And attached to that, we've got our education institutions, we've got our healthcare institutions, our aged care institutions. And then like coming off that again, we've got some church-owned businesses and publishing houses and health food companies and that occupies this one vertical of the church.

Then there are the supporting or the independent ministries that operate technically outside of the structure, but are overtly Adventist in nature. They are the ones that are technically moving the church forward from a missional perspective. Where I'm focusing my attention in my research and where we're focusing it with our company anyway, is on this extra category. And this extra category is Adventist businesses that are specifically designed to serve the church in the digital space.

And when I say the church, I mean all of those Adventist organizations and are serving those in the digital space. That subgrouping of businesses, I think are fantastically important because that is the hotbed of innovation. You know, if you rewind to the Reformation, you know, these innovations like Gutenberg and the printing press in general and all of these things that we've figured out throughout time, they have happened, or I should say in the modern sense, I believe that those things get to happen in these small businesses or, you know, there's entrepreneurial ventures that have all these good ideas that need to be developed and fleshed out and probably too small to be of much consequence until they actually achieve their goals. And those are the ones I think we need to serve.

And that's a part of what I'm hoping that we get to do with our initiatives. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's like there's so much already happening in the church, right?

And so getting your head across all those different spaces and what actually has been happening and is happening and how we can serve in that space the best to grow it and to make it, again, that unified voice that is speaking to the world and is presenting that unified solution, I guess. That's probably not quite the right wording, but you know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean. So say that I'm like a new person who has also been thinking some of the lines like, you know, I do my solo thing by myself, but I really do want to be involved in other people who are making a difference and are growing this and improving the digital presence of the church.

How do I get involved in knowing about this database or being in this database and being able to help out in this space? What would you say to people like that? My objective with the database, I want to make it public. I want to let that out there.

I'm writing a series of posts that we're going to put on our website. But if you fit into any of those categories, if you would like to be on that database, if you are doing something that is serving the church in the digital space, I would love to add you to it. Of course, otherwise, if you're a church administrator and you are wanting to get access to the database for your own benefit, let me know. So I'd love to be able to share my findings with you guys, but you can do that.

Jump on out on our website, BlueVenue.com. You can reach us there or reach out on LinkedIn or social media or wherever you happen to find us. I'm not sure if you're following me on LinkedIn, but if you're following me on LinkedIn, you can find us. I'm not that hard to find Luke Farooja on virtually everything.

So yeah, let me know. I'd love to talk to you about it. Sounds good. Yeah.

Thanks so much for going through some of that history and that I'm keen to delve in future episodes into how to redefine the ecosystem and how to grow in it. But yeah, that's really awesome start just to look at where we've come from, where we're going and what that's going to look like. And we've referenced a few cool things in here. What was that other podcast Yeah, the Adventist History Podcast.

So yes, they are like the original godfather of Adventist podcasting. So he's been around longer than I think any of us. He's a legend. So if you haven't listened to that, I strongly recommend.

Awesome. So we'll drop some of those in the show notes. Super grateful you tuned in today and hope this was of value to you. Oh, one thing, one thing before we go.

I just want to throw it out there that we will be at the Hive Conference in Sydney. Oh, yes. How could we forget? I know, right?

So if you, if you are going to be there, please come and say hello to us. If you're not and you are in the area, maybe you should. So check that out. We'll put that in a link in the show notes as well.

See you guys for the next episode.