Brent Hardinge is the Director of Adventist Connect at the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The ministry, known for 43 years as Adventist Information Ministry, has run the contact center behind media ministries including It Is Written, Voice of Prophecy, and Hope Channel. Today its focus has widened to equipping the local church for digital ministry across North America, from web platforms to targeted outreach campaigns.
Adventist Church and School Connect has been around for about 18 years and gone through several iterations. It started with a simple vision, a web presence for every church and school, back when building a site meant hand-coding HTML and writing CSS from scratch. With around 7,000 churches in North America, the question was always how do you do that at scale. A few years ago we recognised we needed to make a shift, and the division agreed it was critical for our churches and schools to have sites that are inviting, informative, and easy to use, built for teachers and pastors who are not web experts and do not have the budget to bring in outside help.
So the decision was made to move to WordPress, and we are renaming the platform Frame. There are two flavours of site. The basic one is essentially a single page pulling the church name, address, service times, and pastor information straight from our membership system, a placeholder that is simply there in case a church wants it. If they want more, they request an upgrade and we generate a full site they can completely rewrite and make their own. We have roughly 4,000 sites still to migrate. The biggest win is that this platform is completely owned by the church, hosted on the North American Division’s own data centre, not licensed from a third party. That is a meaningful shift in what the church controls going forward.
It started about two years ago with the question, we have this technology, we have very targeted advertising, how do we make that part of the evangelism picture of a church? A group from the General Conference, the conference, and our team came together and realised we were all thinking about the same things. The General Conference had already tried ads on health, on prophecy, on Bible study during COVID, and hands down prayer had the highest response of anything. Who does not have prayer requests? It does not matter on religion. Even people who are not religious will engage if they feel someone is praying for them. So we put up ads asking people if they had prayer requests, with someone ready to respond in real time, and then follow up days later to ask how things were going.
When we started, we almost stopped. The first ads flopped. We were paying up to $95 per lead, which is completely ridiculous. So we kept building, in the end around 800 or 900 variations, until we got the cost down to about $3.50. Across six churches in about three months we generated four to five hundred people pouring their hearts out to someone on the other end. One woman had been chatting with us, and within two weeks she said, I am ready to come to your church, will I meet you this week? We went, wait a minute, we are 2,000 miles away. This has to be the local church. We can now promise over 300 interests in a community in a month. The biggest challenge is never the leads, it is having enough people in the church ready to respond. The harvest is great, but the workers are few.
Five years is about as far out as anyone can really predict right now, and AI is a huge part of that. One of the most common questions we get at the start of a conversation is simply, is this AI? People are guarded. They are not sure what they are engaging with on the other end. I think AI is an amazing tool. I use it almost every day in my work. But what it does not do is provide human connection. 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.
Sharing the gospel is a job we have been given, and we cannot just outsource that to technology. Where I live we get big snowstorms, and my favourite time is right after a heavy one, before the plows come through, because everyone comes outside to shovel and the neighbours finally meet each other. I have met so many people through snowstorms who I would never have met otherwise. Most of the time we drive to work, drive home, and disappear. Digital lets us reach into private spaces, the phone someone carries everywhere, in a way that is genuinely hard to do otherwise. There are going to be new things we have no idea about yet, but I am excited about finding ways to use whatever comes next for ministry and mission.
To many people, technology is a mystery. For those of us who live in it, this is second nature, but to a lot of church members, building a website or running Facebook ads is a black box. It is not actually that hard, but it takes learning and experimenting. There are things we can do that a local church cannot do as easily. We run a connection centre here that can respond quickly to people, and that fast first response is really the first step in any successful engagement campaign. I love that our organisation can take that off the table for a church and say, we will handle the first step, and as soon as you are ready, we will pass the interest to you.
Because the local church is where it needs to happen. We can start the conversations here, but we hand them off, and that is where the exciting things happen. That is where someone gets to be the neighbour, to be the hands and feet of Christ in their community in a way we simply cannot do digitally. We can also come alongside a church and train their members in how to have these conversations, the kind that actually head somewhere. If we ever get to the point where we are no longer needed, I say praise the Lord, because that means everyone is out there doing the work. Until then, I am glad Adventist Connect can be here to help.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the complete episode of the Blue Vineyard Podcast. Brent goes further on the prayer ads stories that changed local churches, the “A Picture of God” website and a baptism that started with a chat, and what the North American Division’s data centre investment means for the future of Adventist digital ministry.
Need digital services for your ministry? Visit Blue Vineyard
Have an idea for the show? Get in touch