Adventist World Radio (AWR) will close its Americas Region office in Costa Rica on Sept. 6, 2004, and continue its radio ministry in Central and South America through a new partnership with the Adventist Media Center - Brazil, operated by the church’s South America region.

“While we have worked in the Americas for more than 20 years, first by shortwave radio and then by feeding radio programs to AM and FM stations by satellite, we now find that South America has a very fine media center and Inter-America has several very well-developed stations,” says Benjamin Schoun, AWR president. “These two [church regions] have the highest membership in the world church and a strong organizational structure, so it seemed appropriate that we reconsider what AWR had been investing in that area since it almost appeared to duplicate what is now being done by local people.”

These local stations and media centers did not exist when AWR first began its work in the Americas, but more recently, both AWR and the South American media center sent their programs to the same satellite. AWR decided that the most cost-effective course of action in this region would be to assist the center with the costs of recording and uplinking programs, and saving the costs of having its own land, building, operations center, and 16-member staff.

“The concept for this shift arose out of the fact that we still have great needs and unentered areas in the highest-priority countries of the world, such as the 10/40 window,” Schoun explains. The 10/40 window is an area defined by an imaginary rectangle that extends between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north of the equator, stretching from western Africa to eastern Asia, and is largely dominated by non-Christian religions.

“These places do not have freedom of religion, do not allow our church access to ... local media, have a very low ratio of Adventists or Christians to the population, and do not have a strong Adventist support base from which to carry on their work.

“There are places in the Middle East and elsewhere that we have not entered and languages that we have not been in a position to develop,” Schoun adds. “AWR is defined as the mission radio arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and that is the mandate we must focus on. While we are happy to serve in established territories, such as the Americas, we feel that the responsibility of the work can be carried on by local entities, releasing us to work in places where there are no resources of that kind.”

Schoun says that in the Americas the stations who use AWR programming “will not see much difference, if any, in the actual service. We will still have Spanish programming 24/7 that will be gathered from the best programs produced by individual stations in both [church regions], as well as a couple of programs that are produced specifically for the network. These programs are available to numerous stations through the satellite feed; thus, no one local station has such a heavy responsibility for coming up with all-new programming themselves.”

The media center will become an affiliate of AWR and will use the AWR name. Operations will be managed by center director Milton Souza and radio broadcast director Flavio Ferraz.

Production of AWR’s most popular program, Clínica Abierta (Open Clinic), remains in the Inter-American church region, where it is being moved from Costa Rica to Puerto Rico. Radio Sol (WZOL) will continue the format of a physician and host conducting interviews and taking live telephone calls with questions from listeners from both regions.

“The staff in Costa Rica are very dedicated individuals and did a superb job during the transition,” Schoun emphasizes. “When this restructuring plan was first discussed, they demonstrated great understanding and support for the changes, even though it would affect their jobs.”