The story of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is a story about making “disciples of Jesus Christ who live as His loving witnesses and proclaim to all people the everlasting gospel of the Three Angels’ Messages in preparation for His soon return.”1 However, making disciples has never been as challenging as it is today than it was when the Seventh-day Adventist Church was first organized. Gorden Doss highlights three reasons for this daunting task:
The exponential growth of the world’s population. The world’s population was only 1.7 billion people when the Seventh-day Adventist church was born. Today, the population is more than 7 billion.
The composition of the world’s population is very challenging. For 150 years Christians were about one third of the world’s population. But most Christian countries today have become secularized. The 5 billion people which comprises two-thirds of the population are adherents of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism which make up almost half of humanity.
75% of Adventists live in the Americas (North, Central, South). 25% of Adventists live in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, where about 75% of the world’s population live. This is where Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are at the center, where mega countries like China and India are located, and where so many people are secularized groups are relatively unresponsive to any form of Christian evangelization.2
For the past 150 years, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has made many attempts at preaching the gospel in these regions where 75% of the world’s population live. Even so, we barely scratched the surface, why? It may be the way we communicate the message. As Rajkumar Dixit points out, “If there is nothing wrong with the story, then perhaps there is something faulty about the way we are telling it. We need to rebrand the story in a way that will be contextually relevant to our audience.”3 Hence, there is a need to use new strategies in the way we communicate our message.
It is time we ask ourselves the question, how can we make the gospel relevant to the needs of a world living in constant fear? How do we communicate the gospel to the world in the face of a global crisis of this magnitude? Where are we now, at a time when COVID-19 has managed to put two opposite words together into one odd phrase, social distancing? The best and only viable option is to go online and become digital missionaries! The threat of the virus presents a unique opportunity for the gospel message to go viral.
Laura Krokos and Angi Pratt emphasized the potential of doing mission online during these last days, “This is the first time in the history of the world that it is realistically possible to accomplish the mission God has set before us. The potential to accomplish and finish the mission is real. This generation has the potential to be the last generation.”4
Here are some interesting facts about why we should go online
Statistics points out that 63.5% of the world’s 7.7 billion population comprises the millennials (31.5%) and generation Z (32%)5
These young adults prefer stories in social media platforms and watching YouTube video content online
Research points out the type of videos being watched on YouTube include: Music Videos, vlogs, funny/comedy, Cooking, Science and technology, educational, how-to guides and tutorials, news, product reviews, cooking, etc.
As more people are looking for stories in the social media, isn’t it high time that the church should focus more on creating online contents to communicate the gospel more effectively? Along with this is to ask, what would Jesus do? Leonard Sweet points out that “Jesus was crucified not for being a bad theologian but for being a compelling communicator of God’s kingdom and extremely good at telling stories...”9 His teaching method is summed up in Luke 15: 3, “So He spoke a parable to them.” Storytelling was His way to winning people’s hearts. His stories about the lost coin, the lost ship, or the lost son (the prodigal son) have profound implications about what God is like and how He treats sinners and the lost. And Jesus told it to at least four groups (see Luke 15:1) of people who were not supposed to be seen together in the group because of religious, racial, political, or social reasons. However, they have one thing in common - they could not resist good stories! They were willing to break down barriers to listen to Jesus. As followers of Jesus are we not in the best position to also be in the business of storytelling?
Reading into Jesus’ stories, and practically all stories in the Bible, and, in fact, all the award-winning films and novels, they all have these five elements of great storytelling: 1) Character 2) Conflict 3) Care 4) Course 5) Call for action. If you put it in a sentence, it’s like this: A CHARACTER who wants something, encounters CONFLICT in getting what he wants, then he meets someone who CARE, who provides him a COURSE OR PLAN, and CALLS HIM FOR ACTION. Call it the five C’s of storytelling. This formula is an adaptation to Donald Miller’s Storybrand framework.10 If we follow this formula we have a crack at winning people’s hearts especially that the engagement in the online world is not just one on one but one to many, then from many to many.
Studs Terkel wrote as quoted by James Holtje, “People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality, too. It goes from generation to another.”11 Jonah Berger adds, “People don’t just share information, they tell stories. We need to make our message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell the story without it.”12 The Bible is a storybook that tells of our beginning and where we are heading. Above all, the Bible tells us that God is involved in the story of His people because He is the creator of the story of our lives.
We have a distinctive story to tell, and we have a world waiting for the story to be told. Isn’t it high time to tell the story of Jesus and His love?
References:
1. Seventh-day Adventists (2018). Available online at https://www.adventist.org/articles/mission-statement-of-the-seventh-day-adventist-church/, updated on 10/15/2018.
2. Doss, Gorden R. (2018): Introduction to Adventist mission. Berrien Springs MI: Institute of World Mission Department of World Mission.
3. Dixit, Rajkumar (2010): Branded faith. Contextualizing the gospel in a post-Christian era. Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock Publishers.
4. Krokos, Laura; Pratt, Angi (2012): Reach. How to use your social media influence for the glory of God. Reachebook.com
5. Miller, Lee J.; Lu, Wei (2018): Gen Z Is Set to Outnumber Millennials Within a Year. In Bloomberg, 8/20/2018. Available online at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-20/gen-z-to-outnumber-millennials-within-a-year-demographic-trends, checked on 8/19/2020.
6. Baron, Jessica (2019): The Key To Gen Z Is Video Content. In Forbes, 7/3/2019. Available online at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicabaron/2019/07/03/the-key-to-gen-z-is-video-content/#65a689933484, checked on 8/19/2020.
7. MarTech Series (2018): It’s All in the Stories: How To Attract Millennials And Gen Z. Available online at https://martechseries.com/video/video-advertising/stories-attract-millennials-gen-z/, updated on 8/14/2018, checked on 8/19/2020.
8. The Top 10 Kinds of Short Videos Gen Z Is Watching – YPulse (2020). Available online at https://www.ypulse.com/article/2019/06/26/the-top-10-kinds-of-short-videos-gen-z-is-watching/, updated on 8/19/2020, checked on 8/19/2020
9. Sweet, Leonard I. (2012): Viral. How social networking is poised to ignite revival. 1st ed. Colorado Springs Colo.: WaterBrook Press.
10. Miller, Donald (2017): Building a storybrand. Clarify your message so customers will listen / Donald Miller. New York: HarperCollins Leadership.
11. Holtje, James (2011): The power of storytelling. Captivate, convince, or convert any business audience using stories from top CEOs. New York, N.Y.: Prentice Hall Press.
12. Berger, Jonah: Contagious. Why Things Catch On. New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster.