One Foot Out of the Door

I wasn’t sure I belonged in the room.

Perhaps that is the most truthful place from which to begin.

I had been invited to an Area 3 fraternal meeting in Sheffield to contribute to a conversation around communication, community and OneVoice27. The last time I had sat in a gathering like this was during the years I served as Communication and Media Director for the North England Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

Back then, rooms filled with pastors, administrators, departmental leaders, strategy, mission and evangelism were part of the architecture of my life.

But that was then.

For some time now, I have looked at the church I have loved for decades with what I have often described as one foot out of the door.

Not because everything I once believed suddenly disappeared. Belief is rarely that tidy. Neither is belonging.

Sometimes distance becomes protection.

You step away not necessarily because you have stopped caring, but because you care enough to know how deeply a place can wound you. You learn to observe rather than participate. You remain close enough to recognise the language, the rhythms and the people, but far enough away that you tell yourself whatever happens inside cannot quite reach you.

So there was an irony in being invited back into that room to contribute.

And before I had even spoken, another question emerged:

Am I qualified to be here?

I am not a pastor.

I do not have a theological degree.

I cannot introduce myself as a third- or fourth-generation Seventh-day Adventist, as though denominational genealogy somehow establishes one's legitimacy.

What I have is a degree in film, a master's in journalism, decades of experience in media and communication, years working within communities, cameras, microphones, stories and whatever wisdom one accumulates by spending a lifetime listening to people.

Still, sitting amongst pastors, I wondered:

Is that enough?

By the end of the day, I realised I may have been asking the wrong question.

No Other Name

North England Conference President, Pastor Steve Palmer spoke early in the meeting.

His message came from Acts 4:12: there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.

The sermon was titled No Other Name.

There was humour, theology, biblical history, language, identity and the occasional reminder that somewhere in Pastor Palmer's academic journey, there had been some Greek.

But one sentence cut through everything else.

Speaking directly into the OneVoice27 conversation, Palmer said:

“We are talking about one voice, and I hope that Jesus will be the one voice that is heard.”

It stayed with me.

Churches are very good at initiatives.

We name them.

Brand them.

Design banners.

Create hashtags.

Form committees.

Develop strategies.

Then, if we are not careful, the machinery becomes louder than the message.

Palmer's challenge was remarkably uncomplicated.

Stay with the name.

Later, he returned to it: don't preach our own theories and philosophies. “Preach the name.”

Jesus.

That almost sounds too obvious to say inside a Christian meeting.

Perhaps that is precisely why it needs saying.

Because OneVoice27 cannot merely become another opportunity to advertise Adventism.

If it means anything, the one voice at its centre has to be Jesus.

When a movement becomes a monument

As Palmer spoke, I found myself thinking about a word Adventists have historically used to describe themselves.

Movement.

The Advent movement.

It is a beautiful word.

It is also an unforgiving one.

Because a movement, by definition, has to move.

Eventually movements acquire buildings.

Buildings require maintenance.

Organisations develop structures.

Structures produce departments, constitutions, policies, committees and administration.

None of these things is inherently wrong. Most are necessary.

But there is always a danger that a movement becomes a monument - something we preserve rather than something that propels us.

And perhaps that was part of what I had come to observe that morning.

Was there still movement here?

What I saw suggested that at least some people in the room were determined that there should be.

Fire recognises fire

Many of the faces were unfamiliar to me. That, in itself, was refreshing.

Different backgrounds. Different generations. Different approaches to ministry.

I watched Pastor Ikechi Ekpendu lead the meeting and noticed something seemingly small but significant: responsibility was being distributed.

One pastor carried communication.

Another youth.

Another personal ministries.

Others carried different pieces of the work.

Everything did not appear to reside in one pair of hands.

That may sound administratively unremarkable, but there is something important about leadership that says:

I do not need to carry everything in order to lead everything.

Give people responsibility.

Allow them to develop expertise.

Trust them to carry something.

Maybe that was the first ember.

Because when your own coal has been smouldering for a while, you notice fire.

Perhaps communities work something like a kiln.

There are seasons when my fire burns brightly and yours barely glows.

Then another season comes and yours is ablaze while mine appears almost spent.

Put them close enough together and heat transfers.

A smouldering ember remembers what it was made to do.

I had not expected to feel that in this room.

But I did.

“We already have people in the church”

Pastor Manami Inada spoke about OneVoice27 with a particular kind of excitement.

Her language was simple: the potential already exists.

“We already have people in the church,” she said. What may be needed is the push that helps turn potential towards evangelism.

She described the online world as an ocean… vast, open and filled with possibilities but she was equally clear that digital evangelism cannot exist independently of human community.

Her enthusiasm centred around what he described as two wheels: online engagement and small groups.

One makes contact.

The other creates belonging.

And Inada's own story gave that observation added weight.

She spoke about growing up in an Adventist family in Japan, the daughter of a pastor, yet feeling deeply unhappy within Christianity.

Most of her friends were not Christians. From where she stood, their lives seemed freer, less restricted and less burdened by guilt.

So she left.

Eventually, she said, she discovered that leaving did not produce the peace she expected.

Around the age of 20, her direction began shifting again towards God. Theology study forced her, in her words, to unlearn and then relearn scripture. What emerged was a conviction that Adventist belief was not merely inherited family tradition, but something she could personally own.

I found that interesting.

Because here was a pastor telling the room that being born inside Adventism had not automatically made her belong to Adventism.

She had to leave.

Question.

Return.

Reconsider.

Choose.

And perhaps belonging is strongest when it becomes conviction rather than inheritance.

The people on the margins may already be listening

Then Ashriah Karuma stood up.

She introduced social media as her area of expertise with an infectious energy.

Her presentation was practical … algorithms, hooks, branding, engagement, calls to action - but what interested me most was not the machinery of social media.

It was what happened when somebody used it to speak honestly from their own experience.

Ashriah began from Matthew 28 and described Christian identity simply:

“We are disciples that make disciples.”

Then she told the room about a reel she posted in 2021 inviting people to study the Bible with her.

A friend from sixth form responded.

They studied together.

Later that year, he was baptised.

But the story that stayed with me came afterwards.

Ashriah had created content about the experience of being a neurodivergent Christian.

One of the videos travelled widely online.

Yet she made a distinction that I thought mattered enormously:

Virality was not the important part. Impact was.

She shared the response of someone who had been diagnosed with ADHD and autism and had struggled for years with her relationship with God.

The woman described feeling unseen and misunderstood within Adventism. Her understanding of God had been shaped by fear and punishment. She questioned whether God loved her at all.

Then she encountered Ashriah's video.

What touched her was the recognition that if a neurodivergent brain works differently in so many areas of life, perhaps that person's relationship with God might also be experienced differently.

For somebody who had felt alone, simply being recognised mattered.

And I found myself thinking again about margins.

Churches sometimes construct ministry for an imagined person.

We imagine how they think.

How they learn.

How long they can sit still.

How they process information.

How they dress.

How faith is supposed to sound.

Then we build everything around that person.

Those who do not fit the template learn to translate themselves before we recognise what they carry.

Perhaps we have that backwards.

Maybe widening the microphone is not merely about finding more people to help us run church programmes.

Maybe different people can reach people the rest of us cannot.

Every platform can become a pulpit, but not everybody must become a preacher

Ashriah said:

“Every platform must become a pulpit.”

I understand what she means.

But the journalist and filmmaker in me immediately wanted to extend the thought.

Perhaps every platform can become a pulpit without every creative having to become a preacher.

Let the filmmaker make films.

Let the photographer observe.

Let the writer write.

Let the journalist ask uncomfortable questions.

Let the musician make music.

Let the animator animate.

Let the podcaster create conversations in which people are allowed to say things that might struggle to survive an eleven-o'clock Sabbath microphone.

The pulpit does not have to mean the style.

Perhaps it simply means the place from which truth travels.

And if that is the case, we have far more pulpits than we realise.

Bedrooms.

Studios.

Phones.

Universities.

Editing suites.

Podcasts.

Barbershops.

Kitchens.

Community centres.

And sometimes inside minds that have spent years being told, explicitly or implicitly, that they were too different to stand at the centre.

Where are the young people?

Pastor Derek Simon, Youth Ministries Director, picked up a question I had asked during my own presentation:

Where are the young people,  and how are they involved?

His answer was not simply about creating more youth events.

He spoke about training, responsibility and belonging.

A forthcoming young preachers' conference was designed not only to teach preaching skills, but to give young people a meaningful place within the life of the church.

One of his phrases stayed with me:

“Service can save.”

Not that service itself becomes salvation, but that participation can profoundly affect a young person's journey of faith.

If a young person has something meaningful to carry, they are more likely to feel that they belong.

And belonging matters.

Simon made another point that churches would do well to hear: training a young person once is not enough.

Do not sponsor them for a conference, celebrate them when they return, give them one Sabbath and then place them back on the shelf.

Use them. Mentor them. Trust them.

Give them responsibility consistently.

Because if OneVoice27 is supposed to include every generation, then young people cannot merely be the demographic we are trying to reach.

They must also become people through whom we reach.

Who is already in the room?

That thought brought me back to my own presentation.

I began it by saying that I felt like the least-equipped person on the programme.

Which, in retrospect, may have revealed more than I intended.

My presentation was called From Campaign to Community.

My argument was that 2027 does not begin in 2027.

The work starts now.

Before campaigns, relationships.

Before content, community.

Before looking elsewhere for expertise, ask:

Who is already in the room?

Our churches already contain filmmakers, photographers, writers, musicians, designers, podcasters, editors, presenters, sound engineers and people producing extraordinary things from bedrooms and spare rooms.

Some of them have never been asked.

Some do not hold church office.

Some are young.

Some have not fitted our image of the person we traditionally place at the front.

Some may even believe that because they are not pastors, their work is somehow peripheral to ministry.

I realised the irony even as I spoke.

Because that was precisely the question I had brought into the room myself.

Am I qualified?

Perhaps the better question is:

What am I carrying that might be useful?

Those are very different questions.

Area 3's communication plans reflected the same thinking: not merely gathering official communication teams, but finding members already creating content and helping them use those abilities intentionally.

Maybe I wasn't invited despite not being a pastor.

Maybe I had been invited precisely because I wasn't one.

One voice does not mean one voicebox

At one point the vision was expressed in a sentence that captured something important.

The aspiration was that One Voice should become 2,514 personal voices, not merely the voices of eight pastors.

There it was.

Unity without uniformity.

One voice does not require one voicebox.

A choir does not create harmony by forcing every singer onto the same note.

Perhaps ministry has sometimes made the mistake of trying to reproduce pastors.

Maybe the task is to release people.

Let the preacher preach.

Let the filmmaker film.

Let the designer design.

Let the young person speak in the language their generation actually understands.

Let the neurodivergent Christian articulate God from a perspective another person desperately needs to hear.

Let the journalist investigate.

Let the quiet person serve.

Let all of them point towards the same centre. Jesus.

The church we have and the community around it

Pastor Jacques Venter then did something journalists tend to appreciate.

He brought data.

And data has a useful habit of disturbing assumptions.

His underlying question was:

Does our church resemble our mission field?

The Area 3 figures he presented showed a church in which women make up almost three-fifths of the membership, raising immediate questions about the engagement and retention of men.

He also showed membership concentrated substantially between the ages of 30 and 61, while acknowledging gaps in the age data itself.

Then he looked beyond the church walls.

Census comparisons for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire showed Christianity declining as an identified religion while the proportion identifying with no religion had grown considerably between 2011 and 2021.

But he also pointed to something that statistics do not always capture well: a continuing hunger for spirituality, meaning and questions about God among people who may never have grown up with religious language.

That raises a different set of questions.

It is easy to say: everybody needs Jesus.

But who actually lives outside our church door?

How old are they? What do they fear? How do they live? Are they students? Retired? Living alone? Raising children alone? Lonely? Financially stretched? Digitally connected but socially isolated?

What does their community actually need?

The wider data pointed towards significant numbers of retirees, students and people living alone.

Suddenly, evangelism becomes less abstract.

What does your city need?

This was perhaps the most practical question I wanted to leave with the room.

What does your city need?

Not simply:

What programme would we like to run?

What does Sheffield need?

Huddersfield?

Leeds?

The neighbourhood around your particular congregation?

Mental-health conversations?

Cooking on a budget?

Financial wellbeing?

Support for older people?

Activities for young adults?

Walking groups?

Community meals?

Health initiatives?

Company?

Somebody who knows their name?

These are not distractions from Jesus. Maybe they are ways people discover what the life of Jesus looks like when somebody actually lives it.

Partner before you build

Community work has taught me that churches are very capable of reinventing the wheel.

We identify a need and immediately begin designing a new programme.

Meanwhile the NHS, a university, charity, council project, community organisation or another church down the road may have been doing precisely that work for years.

Why not partner?

Why must everything belong to us before we can serve through it?

Sometimes mission may not require another Adventist-branded event.

Sometimes mission may simply mean:

Turn up and help.

The meeting reflected something of that thinking too. Leaders spoke about resources available for creative and community-focused initiatives, but repeatedly returned to the importance of genuine community impact rather than simply producing more events.

And underneath much of the discussion was another recurring idea.

Belonging.

From screens to people

Ashriah described her digital strategy through four Cs:

Contact. Cultivate. Convert. Conserve.

The final stage interested me most.

Digital spaces might spark a connection, she argued, but the relationship cannot remain trapped behind a screen. People need pathways into real communities, churches and small groups.

Pastor Inada made much the same point from another angle.

Online engagement and small groups are two wheels.

Contact without belonging is incomplete.

That may be one of the most important lessons in all of this.

You can have reach without relationship.

Views without community.

Engagement without belonging.

Followers without friendship.

The algorithm may sometimes be easier to understand than the human being who eventually walks through your door.

What happens when they arrive? Are they seen? Are they heard?

Do they matter after the conversion metric has been satisfied?

Do they find somewhere to belong?

“Hope starts here”

Pastor Ekpendu's OneVoice27 presentation brought the various strands together.

His description was intentionally simple.

OneVoice27's “Mission for All” calls the Church towards prayer, preparation and the intentional sharing of Jesus, with every member, congregation, ministry and generation participating.

The goal, he stressed, was not another programme, but participation through relationships, Bible studies, small groups, community outreach, publishing, media and digital evangelism.

And then he reduced the launch to something almost disarmingly simple.

Take out your phone.

Think of one person.

Send them a message: Jesus loves you. Hope starts here.

No elaborate campaign. No theological essay.

One person speaking to one person.

Perhaps that is what One Voice looks like at its smallest scale.

Not thousands of people shouting simultaneously.

One human being telling another: There is hope.

One foot still near the door

I wish I could finish this article by saying one meeting resolved everything.

It didn't.

And I have no interest in manufacturing a testimony I haven't lived.

There are reasons I learned to stand near the edge of this community.

There are experiences one enthusiastic morning cannot erase.

There are still questions.

So perhaps one foot remains near the door. But something happened in that room.

I arrived asking:

Am I qualified to be here?

I left asking:

What am I still carrying?

There is an enormous difference between those two questions.

This church helped shape me.

It gave me places to learn, serve, lead, fail, create, experiment and discover abilities that I eventually carried into the rest of my life.

Perhaps relationships do not have to be uncomplicated before they can remain meaningful.

Perhaps you can wrestle with something and still love it.

Perhaps you can stand at the margins and see something those standing comfortably at the centre cannot.

And perhaps being invited to contribute rather than simply being expected to conform awakened something.

I went into the meeting believing I was watching from the outside.

Somewhere during the day, I realised I was participating.

Not completely returned. Not suddenly without reservations.

Just closer.

Close enough to feel some heat.

Maybe faith communities really are something like a kiln.

One coal does not interrogate another about how brightly it has been burning lately.

It simply burns.

And when a smouldering ember remains close enough to something still burning, heat begins to transfer.

Maybe service works like that.

Maybe faith does too.

And perhaps the greatest opportunity presented by OneVoice27 will not be another slogan, campaign or denominational programme.

Perhaps it will be the simple act of looking around our churches, including towards those who have learned to sit at their margins and asking:

What are you carrying?

A camera? A pen? A song? A story? An unusual mind? A skill nobody has ever asked you about?

Bring it.

Because if Pastor Palmer's opening challenge is right, ultimately all those different voices are meant to amplify one name.

Jesus.

I walked into that room with one foot out of the door.

I am not yet prepared to say where that foot will eventually land.

But for the first time in a while, I found myself wondering whether perhaps there is still work for me to do on this side of it.

And, for now, that is enough.