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Jarrod Stackelroth is the editor of Adventist Record and Signs of the Times, and has been called to serve as Assistant Director of Communications and News Director at the General Conference’s Adventist News Network. He has spent nearly two decades shaping Adventist journalism in the South Pacific.
“The thing about the magazine is it’s a physical artifact that goes into someone’s home. And the Holy Spirit can use that in a very different way to something you’ve just scrolled past in your feed. If you impact someone on the feed, you’ve impacted them, and if they’ve been really impacted, they may share that. But if you have a magazine in a home, the whole extended family can read it.”
“My grandfather was a missionary for some time in the islands, but he would always send Signs of the Times to his siblings back in Australia. My mother is now sponsoring a subscription for his remaining sister, my great aunt. She has in recent years accepted the Sabbath. Those seeds have been planted for so many years. It’s not a one-off digital splash. It’s an ongoing relationship. It’s something that comes around and builds, slowly, your understanding of faith.”
“The original mandate was to inspire, educate, and nurture. But those are very passive things. I tell you what to think, what to do, what to believe, and you take it on. To inspire means action. I have seen how Record can inspire people to start a ministry. They read something and it changes their life trajectory.”
“The other key function is building community. It’s very easy attending a local church to be stuck in your own bubble, full-time job, two kids, just doing it. So it’s crucial to be reminded that we are part of a global movement. When I read Record, I see what’s happening in Suva, in Port Vila. I am feeling connected to how the church works across the whole division. People in Papua New Guinea are doing extraordinary things. They’re my church people. If they can do it, I can do it. That’s the feeling of family that matters.”
“I ran a writing workshop in Papua New Guinea. I put some bullet points about our workshop into an AI tool and asked it to generate a news story, including a quote. It produced something that looked completely legitimate. But it had made up a student. It invented her name, her course, her face. That person did not exist. If someone had sent me that story, I would not have known.”
“That’s the danger. People are getting turned off AI. They can feel it, or they think they can, and the moment they decide a piece of content is AI-generated, they discount the whole thing. For the church, that is not just a communications problem. It is a trust problem. And trust, once lost, is very hard to rebuild. AI can take data points and string them into a structure. It cannot replicate human experience. It cannot replicate the Holy Spirit.”
“My mother told me before I started working for the church: remember that you’re working for God and not for people. Because the people in the church might hurt you. The decisions made, you might not agree with. I’ve held those words for all these years and they’ve been very helpful at times.”
“Consistency pays off. Keep your nose to the grindstone. But remember that what you’re doing is not for your glory, it’s not for the church’s glory. It’s for God’s glory. If one person reads or listens to something that we create and it changes that person, if it makes a difference for eternity, that’s more important than 20,000 people seeing it. You do what you do for God’s glory, and he will take care of the rest.”
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the complete episode of the Blue Vineyard Podcast. Jarrod goes further on the state of global church communications, standout organisations doing great work, and what he is walking into at the General Conference.
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