Defining the Ecosystem

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. Hi everyone, Luke here.

If you listened to our last episode, you would have heard that we were talking about the Adventist ecosystem, and I'm one of these people who thinks as I talk. And so the last episode really was us exploring the ideas. And over the last few months, I have been collating these ideas into a single article. And I have posted that on the Blue Vineyard website, but some people are more into the audio thing.

So I thought I would post an audio version of that same article. So that's what you're about to hear. After 17 years in the commercial web industry, last year I transitioned into serving Adventist organizations. One of my first tasks was to understand the ecosystem better.

At first glance, our ecosystem can appear to be tightly integrated, in a similar fashion to Catholic or Mormon systems. But if you scratch the surface, you'll find it is a decentralized ecosystem. While the General Conference does sit at the top of the structure, it actually is a collective of 13 global divisions, which themselves consist of smaller organizational units. While each one of these is tightly connected theologically, these individual organizations hold a significant amount of self-determinative power.

This comes with significant benefits and trade-offs that we'll explore later in this post. As I see it today, the Adventist ecosystem, although largely decentralized, fits into five primary categories. Preach, Teach, Profit, Heal, and Protect. What follows is not intended to be exhaustive, but I believe it's a good model for us to begin with.

Preach. These are organizations primarily focused on ministry and the delivery of the message. These include the General Conference, the official global church structure, 13 divisions, these are geographic divisions of the General Conference, unions, these are nested inside of divisions as the next level of organizational leadership. Under that is local conferences.

These are the organizational structures immediately over local churches, and often follow state, province, or regional boundaries. Local churches. This is the smallest organizational unit of the church. This is where membership is held and the realities of ministry, service, and evangelism take place.

It could be said that all levels of administration above this level should exist to train, resource, empower, and equip this level to undertake the work of ministry. Then there's the members that are within those churches. These are the people who have formally attached themselves to the church by baptism or public affirmation of faith. Attendees.

There are many who identify with the Adventist Church who attend our churches but have not yet made the decision to become members. Independent or supporting ministries. These ministries are famous in the Adventist world for specializing in certain audiences and kinds of ministry, for example, amazing facts, voice of prophecy, etc. While they are supportive of the church, they are not owned directly by it.

Then there are media ministries. These are run by the church or its members and seek to accomplish the ministry of the church via media like Hope Channel or Adventist World Radio, etc. Teach. Our church has always cared about education.

This finds expression in a private education system that is second only to the Catholic Church in terms of size. Education system includes early learning centers, elementary schools, high schools, and universities. Heal. With the church's focus on serving the whole person, healthcare is an area of ministry that we invest a great amount of resources in.

Healthcare includes everything from university hospitals to lifestyle medicine centers, mental health initiatives, and smaller clinics. Here is a list of just a few. Loma Linde University Medical Center. Waldfried Hospital in Berlin.

Heartland Wellness Center. Earlier Lifestyle Medicine Center. The Abide Network. PIVIO Health.

Aged care is an extension of our work in healthcare in order to minister to the vulnerable members of our community. There are organizations in the church that seek to provide this care. For example, Seventh-day Adventist Senior Care and Adventist Care. The Adventist Disaster and Relief Agency, or ADRA, is the international humanitarian arm of the church.

It has a focus on health, education, livelihood, and emergency response efforts. Profit. Entrepreneurship is a key part of the origins of Adventists. Many of our pioneers started publishing houses and food manufacturing companies.

Here are the main categories as they relate to the ecosystem. Institutionally owned. Currently started in the time of our church pioneers, church-owned businesses have provided significant financial support to the institution and employment opportunities to many people, both inside and outside of the church. For example, Sanitarium Health Food.

There are also lay-owned organizations. These are Adventist-run businesses in any category who may support the church financially or with their influence. If you'd like to see a list of these, you can look for ASI members or HIVE members. Speaking of HIVE and ASI, to harness the power of these businesses, organizations have formed to serve them, and HIVE and ASI are the best examples of this.

The next category is businesses that serve Adventist organizations. I've broken this out as a subcategory for reasons that will become apparent later in the post, but there are a small subset of businesses that focus their attention on serving the Adventist ecosystem. I've provided further information about that at the end of the post. The next major category is Protect.

The church offers a number of financial and legal services to its employees and members in different world fields. Some of these are internal departments, others are separate organizations, but they all function under this Protect category. For example, Adventist Risk Management, ACA Health Benefits Fund, Adventist Investment Services, Adventist Trust Services, AdventistLawyer.com, ADSAFE, Australasian Conference Association, Superannuation Trust. These are just some examples of the ways the church protects its members.

Who are the key players? Outside of the official denominational leadership, there are a few organizations that seem to be trendsetters. These include but are not limited to ministries like Amazing Facts and The Voice of Prophecy, as mentioned earlier. When these trendsetting ministries adopt a method or idea, it gives legitimacy across the ecosystem.

Here are a few examples. When HMS Richards embraced radio as a means of evangelism, many ministries quickly followed. In more recent times, social media was seen as dangerous by many people in the church, but when we start seeing it leveraged by people like Caleb Isley with Humans of Adventism and the principles being adopted by the Oregon Conference, now we see many similar initiatives run by official church channels across the world. Online churches are another example that are not yet at the tipping point of mainstream Adventism, but we are rapidly approaching that point with initiatives like Living Manor by Ival Meyers and the Love Reality community.

Who holds the influence? Inside the official structure, there is a degree of hierarchical influence, as one would expect, but outside of that the ecosystem seems strongly meritocratic. If you successfully achieve a valuable outcome, for example, like public evangelism, increased discipleship, increased giving, etc., you tend to attract attention and I usually give an opportunity to share these expertise with the broader community. As an example, Justin Koo built up his YouTube channel to over 100,000 subscribers and had a tangible impact in the world of online evangelism.

He has now become a regular speaker at many domestic and international events to draw attention to the digital mission field and train others to take part. What are the benefits of the current decentralized ecosystem? Adaptation and resilience. We intelligently adapt and optimize for local cultures.

This also makes us remarkably resilient in the face of significant challenges like war and social unrest. Organizational autonomy. Most organizations do not mandate specific product or service providers, allowing each body to make decisions that would best suit their situation. This provides the freedom to change providers and solutions rapidly if they are not a good fit.

Financial stability. Thanks to robust funding models and a generally well-educated member base, the church typically manages its resources responsibly. What are the trade-offs? Organizational silos.

Over the last 160-plus years, the Adventist ecosystem has gone from its bootstrapped beginnings to a large global institution. The price of that success is the inefficiencies that come from the natural silos that the institution creates. Lack of continuity. Because different service providers are often selected by each new administration, lessons and momentum are often lost, especially if the leaders are not aware of where to obtain the best advice.

Undefunded innovation. Adventist organizations are typically financially conservative. In emerging industries like digital innovation, this can lead to overburdened staff operating well outside their area of competence, without the appropriate tools and professional services. Where to from here?

My hypothesis is that if we apply the right mixture of technology and entrepreneurship, we should be able to correct for many of the problems delivered to us by our growth and decentralization. I believe the most likely people to accomplish this are those technology entrepreneurs who are primarily serving Adventist organizations. In order to understand this subset of businesses even better, I have decided to start a database of them so I can more clearly identify gaps in the ecosystem. You can access the database in the blog post, so if you head over there, it is bluevignet.com slash defining the dash Adventist dash ecosystem.

Sorry that's a mouthful. But if you just go to the website, bluevignet.com, you should be able to easily find that on the homepage. So I hope you enjoy and if you have any feedback on this article or if you want to add any services or digital products that you know of to the database that I'm creating, please reach out to me. I would love to hear from you.

You can send that to hello at bluevignet.com. My name is Luke and I will catch you next time for another episode of the Blue Vineyard podcast.