Adventist Review news editor and communication director, Pastor Enno Mueller, visited the South Pacific Division (SPD) to attend the Digital Discipleship Conference (DDC), tour some historic sites and share with the team at Adventist Media some of the changes that are happening at Adventist Review.
The announcement of a $A3.6 million Adventist Review budget decrease at Annual Council, means a decrease in the subsidy for printing the Adventist World magazine. For Adventist Review, this means that they will look to combine Adventist World magazine with Adventist Review, presenting one product worldwide. For the South Pacific Division, it means the subsidy provided to print Adventist World was decreased by 25 per cent, meaning a further three issues have been cut from this calendar year.
“Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, we must alter things a little bit, but even if we had a perfect budget, we need to think more digitally,” said Pastor Mueller. “I think all Division communication teams and beyond the divisions, our communications people in the Adventist Church are thinking how, where, how to connect and meet with people. In some parts of the world that is still print, but in more parts of the world , digital is a way to connect with our church members.”
The changes to the Adventist Review brand, including a new logo and combined publication, will be launched at this year’s General Conference Session. Part of the reason for Pastor Mueller’s visit was to help communicate some of those changes to the SPD as well as strategising ways to communicate the changes around the world.
“At this year’s General Conference Session, the two publications that have brought believers together will themselves come together to become one,” shares Adventist Review editor Justin Kim in the March 2025 issue of Review. “Using the legacy name of Adventist Review, with a new logo that points to its history, the editors hope the reimagined magazine will be as deep and wide as its predecessors were.”
The Adventist World issues that are not printed this year will still be available digitally.
“Digital is a way to connect with our church members,” Pastor Mueller said. “And so this is pushing us—maybe a little bit quicker—but is pushing us into the idea of engaging on the digital scope with our church members. And so that means we are still in the phase of trying to decipher exactly what this looks like.”
On the DDC, Pastor Mueller said: “[DDC] was a wonderful conference with a whole bunch of different subjects that were presented and I think incredibly insightful. Some topics were a little bit more specific for the SPD. Others were informative to the point where these are some of the principles that I’m hoping to bring back to Adventist Review and to incorporate into our work.”
Marcos Paseggi, senior news correspondent for Adventist Review, also attended DDC to cover the event.
After DDC, Pastor Mueller spent a day visiting the Adventist Heritage Centre, Avondale University and Ellen White’s historic home, Sunnyside, in Cooranbong, NSW.
“Being at the DDC, visiting Adventist Media, being able to see some of their heritage sites, Avondale University and Sunnyside, has been phenomenal. Just to be able to get a picture of the Advent work here in Australia,” he said.
He learned a lot about Ellen White’s time in Australia and said he didn’t realise how much she contributed during her time in the South Pacific region.
“The tour was incredibly informative. The thing I will take away is that Ellen White—we know her as an author, as an authority figure, as one of the founding members of the Seventh Adventist Church—the amazing thing to me was that she had an open-door policy at Sunnyside. She took in everybody. And even though she was already advanced in age, she was incredibly open to fulfilling the needs of her community. It seems so natural that we ought to be like Jesus. And even if it meant sacrifices on her own part, she did it. And that picture of Ellen White was a beautiful picture that I will walk away from Sunnyside with, that I deeply appreciate.”
Pastor Mueller spent a day with the Adventist Record team, sharing ideas and comparing how the two publications distribute and gather news and articles.
“Magazines like Adventist Record are pivotal for us to be able to share the news beyond the South Pacific territory and to share with people on other sides of the globe or in other divisions the wonderful work and the diversity of Adventism that exists here in the South Pacific,” said Pastor Mueller.
“We, especially in the news, are working a lot on the aggregation model—where we partner with our counterparts and our divisions to be able to get stories from the field. We simply don’t have the resources to cover all of them. And so, to have a network of professionals and professional outlets, and to be able to tap into those stories—Adventist Review would not be able to feature a global narrative of news simply based off the work that we do. So we are fully dependent on the work that happens in each one of our church world territories.”
