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.

We're 2000 miles away. Like we, we can't do this. This has to be the local church. I feel like in a world of AI, the church has to be human to make that, make that connection.

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 onto 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 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 the early choices that you made that set this really interesting trajectory for your career certainly And thank you for having me on. It's good to see you guys, Luke and Adam. Appreciate what you guys do as well.

So 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, but we moved around a lot. So 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.

So 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 and came home from high school, from my senior year of high school. And my dad said, hey, I want to show you this internet thing. And prior to that, 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 he had gone down and gotten from a bookstore and so he's like let me show you this and so we're you know flipping through that really was formulative for me in starting me into the the career that I have 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 AEM. So AEM has been around for 43 years.

We started back in the early 80s and 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 3ABN, 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.

And so we work, 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. Nice. That's such a huge like that's such a broad thing. Is that it?

I mean, I know it's 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 intimidating to her? I don't know. I can't remember how when you started there, but 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. Yep. 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 some very specific projects and specific websites in general, Armenian to be exact. I told, and my wife and I talked about this as we were starting to consider coming here.

I realized I'm not interested in doing one thing and maintaining something that has been this way forever and just continuing to go. I feel like I've been given the gift and the desire to see things change and to see things improve. And, you know, change for change sake is not worth it. But change for to improve the mission and to improve the work that's happening.

Absolutely. And so, yes, it's intimidating. But on the other hand, like, that's why that's why I'm here. And that's the way that I feel like God has has wired me to be able to try and seek to improve things.

And really, you know, for me, it's focusing around the mission of why we're here as a church. And there are amazing tools and amazing technology that we have. But if we if we just live in the past, we're not going to 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 be able to talk like this, which is amazing. And I love 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 so many things that 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. 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 gears, I think they must've been, with that flash, like little spinning gears.

It was... And 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 feels pretty good, but there was still a lot more that I wanted to be able to do. It was limited. 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 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 a 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 6,000, at this point, it's like 7,000 websites, I'm sorry, 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. But we want to make sure that that works well and that it's something that can represent 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 gonna move to WordPress. We have basically two flavors of site.

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 like 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. Puts all that together with, you know, links and an image of the church if we have that.

And that becomes the church website. It has, you know, some basic description about the Adventist Church and links to Bible studies linked to like more on our beliefs but really 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.

And 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 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. Do you have like when this is rolling out?

Like when are people going to be able to see this? So this is something that is just starting to roll out right now. In the coming weeks, I think we spun up several sites today. We have essentially 6,000 websites that were migrating.

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. It obviously takes some work to develop it. But at one point, you just flip the switch and the next moment, once the DNS and everything resolves, you're looking at the new system.

We have approximately four thousand sites left to go. So not too many you know just you know an afternoon's work right there. So we are hoping to get those began migration on on that in a major way soon. 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 it or is that still coming somewhere.

So definitely a lot more is coming. Wow. So first off, I want to say thank you for this effort. This is a 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. This, I mean, is there a time, like, you ever second guess yourself, should we really go with WordPress?

Is this, how is this gonna benefit our church? I'd love to kind of hear, like, what are you excited about with this change? All of this is going to be hosted on the North American Division's data center, so. It's an investment that the division has made over the last years, not just for this project, obviously, but 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. And 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. That 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 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. On that point of owning the hardware and having a data center, I imagine for many people sitting in the pews on the average 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. You know, 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, you know, 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. You guys also deal with the like further up the funnel as well you know in the in the online evangelism space and obviously in the history there's the call center aspect to it. But I you know 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, 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 advertising, 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, there was, we had a group from the GC as well as the conference and all kind of the three of our organizations came together and went, wow, we're like both, all three of us are thinking about the same things and how do we dig into this? So the way it works is put up an ad. asking people if they have prayer requests and who doesn't have prayer requests really across the board doesn't matter on religion even even non-religious people you know 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.

So ads 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. So 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. And 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, it was, we almost stopped. And within that short time that we ran the ads, which was about three months, we ended up generating, kind of remember now, 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 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. 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? Whoa, wait a minute word 2,000 miles away Like we we can't do this. This has to be the local church And so as we've as we've built this out One of the or the 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 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.

We had 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. And this has 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.

So 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, this is what the technology is for.

Like, this is what we're doing. Ah, I love that. You know, we had something happen. I just have to, just thought of this story here.

We support a website called A Picture of God. This is an 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 so one of our people here, he got on and he saw the message right away. And he said, hey, what are you looking to learn? you know, what would be helpful for you?" And she responded, she said, I really want, I'm just starting to read the Bible again. I really want, you know, help with this.

And he said, okay, 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." 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. Um, 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 and It's just it's like uh from from the from the wide end of the funnel from you know Why we're here to like really focusing in on providing support and 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? If you come to AdventistConnect.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.

There is really a lack of resources on how to embrace and engage digital for churches. but that's something that we're looking to really expand and share. For us, yes, there is a cost to doing things, but we're not in it to be making a profit or really making money on it. It is just to cover our costs. So we're here to be a service to churches and to really 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 or 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 can 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, the Chad GPT hit the scene. I know it was like 10 years before in the making. But it really became a big thing, you know, just in the very recent past.

One of the biggest, sorry, it's not the biggest, it's one of the most common questions that we get on a first, at the beginning of a conversation. Is this AI? And people are guarded. People are not sure what they're engaging in, what they're chatting with on the other end.

And 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.

I think we 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. But 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 easy, and I think it's a tool that we absolutely have to use.

But with social media, with texting, with... with the websites, we're able to get into those spaces that are 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. So I think there are going to be new things that we have no idea about when it comes to technology.

But 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, 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 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? Technology to many people is a mystery.

And there are things that we can do that the three of us here is second nature. But 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, you know, there's some things, you know, we're an open book as far as what we what we do. But there's some things that we're able to do that a local church can't necessarily do as well. And so, you know, having a connection center that we operate here where we're able to respond quickly to to people. And that's that's really the first step in 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. So 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. 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 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. Each one was like a whole book.

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 look forward to seeing you guys for our next episode.