Seventh-day Adventist leaders from across the Southern Asia-Pacific region gathered Sept. 20-23 in Bangkok, Thailand, for the OneVoice27 Strategic Alignment and Collaborative Summit, bringing together leaders from Communication, media, NDR-IEL (Nurture, Discipleship, Retention-Integrated Evangelism Lifestyle), Ministerial and Treasury to develop a coordinated approach to mission leading into 2027.
Held at Baiyoke Sky Hotel in Bangkok’s Pratunam district, the four-day summit provided a collaborative space for division and union leaders to align strategies, clarify ministry roles and identify opportunities to share resources. The meeting focused on moving OneVoice27 from separate departmental initiatives toward an integrated mission strategy connecting digital and media outreach with local church engagement, evangelism and discipleship.
Opening the summit, Pastor Alex Ott, associate secretary of the General conference and liaison in-charge of the Southern Asia-Pacific Division for the OneVoice27, emphasized the importance of seeing the global initiative not as a collection of separate programs, but as a connected mission journey in which every ministry has a specific touchpoint. He outlined how communication and media can help reach people and create initial interest, while departments, local churches and church members provide opportunities for deeper engagement, relationships and discipleship. Ott stressed that these touchpoints must intentionally connect with one another so that a person reached through a social media post, video, radio program or other digital content is not left without a clear next step toward a local community of faith. His message helped frame the summit’s central discussion: ensuring that every ministry understands where it contributes to the journey and how its work connects with the efforts of others.
Unlike a traditional departmental meeting, the summit centered on a common question: How can ministries that often operate through different programs, platforms and budgets work together to help one person move from first contact with the Adventist message toward a growing relationship with Jesus and a local church community?
The discussions followed the theme, “One Mission. One Strategy. One Voice.”
Pastor Roger Caderma, president of the Southern Asia-Pacific Division (SSD), said the gathering reflected the need for the church to move beyond individual departmental plans toward a shared mission.
“OneVoice27 is not about one department, one program or one platform,” Caderma said. “Mission belongs to the whole church. If we want to reach people effectively, our ministries must understand how their work connects with one another and, most importantly, how everything we do helps people come to know Jesus.”
From Digital Contact to Discipleship
Central to the summit was the development of an integrated mission pathway summarized into five touchpoint which are identified as the church media, content creators or digital evangelists, bridging events, local church sponsored programs, and the local church.
The framework recognizes that digital evangelism does not end when a person watches a video, responds to a social media post or visits a website. Instead, participants discussed how media, digital platforms, local ministries and churches can work together to provide clear entry points for people who express spiritual interest.
The strategy places media and communication at the beginning of a larger journey rather than treating digital engagement as an end in itself.
Media ministries, communication departments, content creators and other platforms can help reach people. Digital interaction and relevant content can engage them. Churches and ministries can then provide opportunities to connect through relationships and community-based activities, with the ultimate goal of helping individuals become disciples of Jesus.
The approach places particular responsibility on the local church, which leaders identified as the point where digital mission becomes personal.
Participants discussed the importance of preparing congregations not simply to receive names or digital contacts but to welcome people from different backgrounds, listen to their questions, build relationships and provide meaningful opportunities for spiritual growth.
Building Bridges Between Media and the Local Church
One of the summit's major areas of discussion focused on bridging events — welcoming, low-barrier activities designed to connect people reached through digital and media initiatives with Adventist members and local congregations.
These may include health and wellness activities, family and relationship programs, youth activities, community service, skills development, small-group gatherings and other initiatives responding to local interests and needs.
The strategy recognizes that many people, particularly in large urban centers and in areas where Christianity is a minority faith, may not initially respond to an invitation to attend a worship service. A community activity built around a shared need or interest can provide a more natural first opportunity to meet Adventists and develop relationships.
Under the framework presented in Bangkok, local churches can organize regular, relational activities while conferences and missions can coordinate larger monthly events supported by several departments.
The goal is not simply to increase attendance at programs but to ensure that each activity provides a pathway toward continued relationships, spiritual conversations and discipleship.
“We cannot assume that reaching someone means we have connected with them,” Pastor Arnel Gabin said, NDR-IEL director of SSD. “A person may watch our content, respond to an advertisement or attend an event, but someone still needs to welcome that person, listen to them and walk with them. That is where the local church becomes essential.”
Creating a Shared Media Ecosystem
The summit also addressed one of the practical challenges facing Adventist media across the region: large amounts of useful content already exist, but many resources remain scattered among organizations, platforms, languages and individual storage systems.
Participants discussed the development of a shared OneVoice27 media repository where unions, Hope Channel, Adventist World Radio, communication departments, institutions and other ministries can contribute and access mission-focused resources.
Rather than functioning simply as digital storage, the repository is intended to become a shared media ecosystem where content can be created, contributed, contextualized, translated and redeployed across the division.
Each union would have access to the system and would contribute locally produced material while adapting appropriate resources into languages and formats suited to its territory.
The approach could allow one core message to reach multiple audiences through Bahasa, Bahasa Malay, Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Tetun and other languages spoken throughout the Southern Asia-Pacific region.
The repository will also work alongside an integrated content calendar. While the calendar identifies what the church is communicating and when, the repository identifies what resources already exist, what can be contextualized and what still needs to be produced.
The strategy encourages organizations to reuse and contextualize effective content before investing resources in producing similar materials independently.
Different Ministries, One Journey
Sessions throughout the summit emphasized that collaboration does not require every ministry to perform the same function.
Communication departments, Hope Channel, AWR, Ministerial, NDR-IEL and other ministries maintain distinct responsibilities. Under OneVoice27, however, those responsibilities contribute to the same mission journey.
Media ministries can develop and distribute contextualized content. Communication teams can coordinate messaging and digital engagement. Departments can contribute subject-matter expertise and organize activities related to their ministries. Ministerial and NDR-IEL leaders can help prepare pastors, churches and members for evangelism, follow-up and discipleship.
Local churches ultimately provide the relationships through which online contacts can become part of a community of faith.
The strategic framework presented during the meeting identified three broad streams of work: unified media outreach, local church-based disciple-making and harvest evangelism, and outreach to major urban centers.
The streams are intended to operate as interconnected parts of the same strategy rather than independent projects.
“Our departments do not need to lose their identity for us to work together,” said Pastor Jacinth Adap, SSD treasurer.
“Each ministry brings something important to the mission. What we need is to understand where those contributions meet so that the person we are trying to reach does not fall between our programs.”
Preparing Churches for the People They Pray to Reach
Discussions repeatedly returned to local church readiness.
Leaders recognized that expanded digital evangelism could generate more conversations and contacts, but those efforts will have limited impact if congregations are not prepared to receive people who respond.
The OneVoice27 strategy therefore calls for churches to identify leaders and members who can welcome guests, provide follow-up and accompany individuals through their spiritual journey.
This preparation includes helping churches become welcoming environments for people who may have little knowledge of Adventist beliefs, worship practices or church culture.
The strategy also calls for missions and conferences to develop clearer processes for transferring digital contacts to local churches so that inquiries are not lost between media platforms and local ministry.
For SSD leaders, this represents an important shift in understanding digital evangelism. Technology may initiate a conversation, but discipleship requires relationships.
Moving From Planning to Implementation
Representatives reviewed their existing initiatives, ministry calendars, media capacity, evangelism plans and available resources while identifying areas where departments could collaborate rather than duplicate activities.
Participants also worked toward organizational commitments covering the first 30, 60 and 90 days following the meeting.
During the first 30 days, organizations are expected to organize — clarifying responsibilities, gathering ministry plans into integrated calendars and identifying priority audiences and churches.
During the following 60 days, ministries will build — developing contextualized resources, training leaders and strengthening processes for transferring contacts from media and community initiatives to local churches.
By 90 days, organizations are expected to begin activating those plans, with unions coordinating ministries and local churches increasingly prepared to receive, care for and disciple people reached through OneVoice27 initiatives.
The process also calls for continuing coordination between the division, unions, conferences and missions rather than allowing the Bangkok meeting to become an isolated planning event.
One Mission Across Diverse Cultures
The collaborative approach is particularly significant within the Southern Asia-Pacific Division, where the church serves culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse populations across Southeast Asia.
Rather than creating one program that must look identical everywhere, OneVoice27 seeks to provide a common mission framework that unions and local fields can contextualize for their communities.
A digital campaign in Indonesia may look different from one in the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam or Timor-Leste. The language, platform, content and bridging activities may change, but leaders agreed that the mission journey should remain connected — reaching people, engaging their interests, connecting them with caring Adventist communities and helping them become disciples of Jesus.
“We are serving very different cultures, languages and communities across this division,” Caderma said. “One voice does not mean everyone must sound exactly the same. It means that wherever we serve and whatever platform we use, we are moving toward the same mission — helping people encounter Jesus.”
The summit concluded on Sept. 23. Leaders returned to their respective territories with the responsibility of bringing the collaborative framework into union, conference, mission and local church planning.
The success of OneVoice27, leaders emphasized, will ultimately depend less on the number of programs produced than on whether the different parts of the church can work together to accompany people through a complete spiritual journey.
For the Southern Asia-Pacific Division, the meeting in Bangkok represented a move from preparing individual initiatives toward building a connected mission system — one in which media opens doors, ministries build bridges, churches create belonging and relationships lead people toward Jesus.
One Mission. One Strategy. One Voice.