I’m sick of Seventh-day Adventist media. Adventist radio is aimed at older women, Adventist literature is aimed at older men, and Adventist television is blindly shooting into oblivion when it could be blowing away the youth. My age demographic is an open target that Adventist media isn’t aiming for.

Adventist television stations are nonprofit organizations, meaning they run solely on donations from viewers. Clearly this puts limitations on what these stations can and cannot do. They forfeit their right to produce innovative programming because they can’t afford to risk losing the sponsorship they receive largely from older, retired members of the Adventist Church.

I’d like to counter that the Seventh-day Adventist Church cannot afford to risk nipping spiritual growth in the bud, spiritual growth whose fertilizer is the young people, Adventist and non-Adventist, Christian and un-Christian, who are searching for meaning and purpose in life.

The goal of Adventist television programming should be to reach out to people who are searching for that "something" missing in their lives, while reinforcing and strengthening the beliefs of even the seventh-generation Adventists. Instead, the programs only succeed in reaching those near or in retirement who can donate money to the station. An Adventist television station would have to risk the alienation of its benefactors in order to reach a larger group of searchers.

So, stations like 3ABN air their inspirationally "past its sell-by date" line-up, sit back and hope that a few twenty-something channel surfers happen upon its station at the very moment they realize that they are searching for meaning and purpose in life. This sit-back-and-wait method of witnessing is doing nothing for the Church.

Study after study has proven that media is one of the optimum tools for reaching people, with the greatest results shown after the smallest amount of time. In Lubbock, Texas, studies were done in which a survey was taken by a mixed group of the population, which gauged their attitudes toward the Adventist Church. Only 17 percent felt positively about it.

For the next month, local television stations aired inspirational spots sponsored by the Adventist Church. After that month, surveys were taken again, and this time approximately 70 percent of those surveyed felt positively about the Adventist Church. Clearly, we have the ability to reach out through a television medium.

However, if we continue down the road we’re on now, airing programming that talks down to the youth and strokes the patriarchal egos of the Church’s generous elderly, the Church will die. The elderly have made vast contributions to the Church, but when they are gone, who will be left?

I often find myself wondering if many of my friends attending Adventist colleges will go to church after they have graduated. Many of them attend services now because of the social aspect, to be with friends and find out what’s on the agenda for the afternoon.

But let’s face it, college churches are quite different from most other Adventist churches. Not all graduates will be fortunate enough to live near a college church where young people compose a majority of the congregation and services are geared toward a more youthful audience. Is faith the bigger draw, or is it fun? Is it possible to use fun to appeal to faith? Clearly, something more than church services will have to reach out to the young Adventist.

I think that "something" could be creative, cutting-edge television programming aimed toward the college age demographic. Right now, the only programming for the eighteen to twenty-five year-olds is cheesy and out of date. With strong efforts made to revolutionize the kinds of programming we air, Adventist television can become an amazing tool for witnessing, for entertainment, and for strengthening faith in the Adventist Church.

It will take quite a bit of creativity in programming, a lot of finesse with the moneybag octogenarians who don’t like the clanging tambourine, and probably a little more volunteer help from younger people with fresh ideas and rich grandparents. But the effort and the risk will all be worth it if the Adventist Church intends to get off the endangered species list.

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