Bracknell, Berkshire, England, United Kingdom …. [ANN Staff]
A two-week “relational” television series, created by Seventh-day Adventists and broadcast worldwide via satellite, is reaching people around their world — and impacting their lives with an “experiential” presentation of the Gospel message.
Called the “Evidence” series, the shows — produced in a church sanctuary converted into a TV studio — dwelt on life issues and were deliberately produced with a secular viewing audience in mind, organizers say. This is the first time that the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Trans-European region has used television media as a means of reaching out to an unchurched audience.
Viewers in Sweden, Norway, South Africa, Croatia, Serbia, Iceland, Ukraine, Australia, the Netherlands, as well as in Japan and the United States all reported tuning in to view the program via satellite. In Iceland, a woman living in an isolated village called the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Iceland and said, “I’ve been watching your program and I want to join your church.”
However, notes “Evidence” executive producer Miroslav Pujic, “our main audience was in the United Kingdom, with well over 1,000 Adventist homes viewing the program with their friends, called LIFEgroups, and 70 LIFEcentres, which were larger viewing groups meeting in church halls.”
Dwight Nelson, pastor of the Pioneer Memorial Seventh-day Adventist Church in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and Gillian Joseph, a veteran BBC television and radio news presenter, were the joint hosts for the series. The first show, aired March 1, centered on a universal
question: “Where is Love?”
The show featured “man-in-the-street” interviews, live, in-studio interviews with children, a sociologist and a psychologist, and musical performances. All were aimed at discovering if people know the answer to that question and whether they understand what love is all about and where it originates.
Reaction to the series has been overwhelmingly positive, organizers say. “For two years we have been preparing for this approach and preparing our members to face up to the realities of interfacing with secular people,” says British LIFEdevelopment coordinator Pastor Alan Hodges. “Through our ‘Get Connected’ phase, we encouraged members to make friends with secular people and allow them to belong to church friendship groups even before they believe. Many of our members have embraced this fully and we are seeing the fruits of that work now as secular people have been brought into ‘Evidence’ viewing groups.”
“There are some who have misunderstood just who the ‘Evidence’ series is for,” says Pastor Cecil Perry, president of the church in Britain. “We wanted to move away from what was comfortable for all of us and produce something that would at least have a chance of speaking to secular people. I’m very pleased to hear that many non-Adventist and non-Christian people are staying with the series, because that is whom it is for. It is not primarily aimed at giving reassurance to those who are already Christians, although the content does speak in new ways to believers.” A more doctrine-oriented approach will be taken in “Mind the Gap,” a follow-up series to “Evidence” to be broadcast in the fall.
“Presenting Biblical values to our secular unchurched friends in a way that is relational, not propositional, invitational, not instructional, using life stories and comments from real people in the street, I believe helped our viewers to understand the subjects in a more authentic way,” says Pujic.
John T.J. Banks, media relations director for the world church, gave the “Evidence” series high grades for its production values.
“From a production perspective, the ‘Evidence’ series was professionally produced – in terms of sound, lighting and interaction with the audience. Post-modernists, the particular target audience for LIFEdevelopment is familiar with television primarily as an entertainment medium, and this production was aiming to meet the expectations of that audience,” Banks says.
“Evidence” programs will be repeated on the Hope Channel every Friday for the next 10 weeks. For more information about the “Evidence” programs, the Hope Channel, and LIFEdevelopment, see the Web sites at www.hopetv.org, www.hopetv.org.uk, and www.LIFEdevelopment.info.
Copyright © 2003 Adventist News Network.
