How to Share Ellen White with a Digitally Native, AI Immersed Generation (Part 3)
In part 2 of this series, I shared what I believe is the real issue underneath emerging western generations in the SDA church no longer having much of an interest in Ellen White.
That disengagement is something I’ve observed in my own decade of full time ministry. But it’s not just a personal observation. Many Adventist parents, pastors and passionate believers see that younger people just aren’t as interested in her work as their forefathers were.
So my question is twofold. First, why is this happening? Second, what can we do about it?
The first question we explored in parts 1 and 2 of this series. (If you haven’t read those yet, go back and read them here and here.)
And now in part 3, I want to take a shot at the second question. And the second question has a two-phase answer. If we want to get young people to engage Ellen White we need to present her in a way where they don’t run the moment they encounter her. That’s phase one. Phase two is to then engage with her in such a way that young people actually lean in.
And these aren’t the same thing. Because so much of how we present EGW historically clashes with the cultural operating system of a post to metamodern generation, we have to find a new way of talking about her that, to borrow from her own words, does not “awaken unnecessary prejudice” and therefore “close minds to truth” before the exploration even begins.
And this is why understanding part 2 of this series, and the shift away from the epistemic authority of older pre-modern and modern generations, is so important. Because if we continue to present her to a generation conditioned by epistemic decentralization — amplified by the internet and now AI — using a model that made sense to the bygone era of epistemic authority, then we have lost any chance of getting youth engaged with her work and legacy.
So again, step one is to find a way to talk about her that awakens curiosity rather than resistance. And then step two, once that curiosity is in place, to engage her in such a way that young listeners are willing to lean in, explore, understand, and value her contribution.
In this blog I’ll talk about phase one: awakening curiosity. In the next blog, we’ll talk about phase two: leaning in.
Awakening Curiosity
How do you awaken curiosity in someone? In my experience, the answer is simple. You awaken curiosity by touching on something your listener already wonders, struggles with, or is anxious about. In other words, you don’t manufacture curiosity from nothing. You also don’t force it into being. Instead, you mine it out of already existing resources. I call these resources a person’s QPAs — questions, problems and anxieties. If you can present an idea or theme in a way that interacts with someone’s QPAs meaningfully, you have a chance at awakening curiosity.
Here’s why this works: QPAs represent what a person wants to understand. The key word here is “want.” They want an answer to their question. They want to solve their problem. They want a remedy for their anxiety.
When you present an idea in a way that interacts with those QPAs, the person immediately senses that perhaps this new idea or theme might contain answers, solutions, and remedies that they don’t currently have. They sense their gap. And that gap, once seen, is where curiosity lives. They want to fill that gap. So if you can show someone that a specific idea might fill their gap, they stop. They turn around. They pay attention.
What this means is that if we want younger generations to stop and pay attention to EGW, we have to present her in a way that addresses their QPAs — not ours, not even her own.
The QPAs of Ellen’s generation were entirely different from those of young people today. Back in EGW’s day, the western world was predominantly pre-modern and was moving toward modernism. In that world, the vast majority of people you met were already religious. And religious pre-modern people were asking questions that younger generations today don’t encounter in a postmodern world. Instead, youth today encounter a world that no one in the 1800s could even begin to imagine: a world of social media, dual-dimensionality (the bounce between physical and digital realms thanks to smartphones) Artificial Intelligence, and a hyper-chaotic economic and political landscape, to name a few.
So if we introduce Ellen White as someone God used to answer the QPAs of a pre-modern world, youth growing up in a postmodern world won’t see any reason to go out of their way to read her. She might be interesting here and there. But for the most part, she’s just an old lady who lived in the old times and has very little to say about the now times. And the now times are wild.
But if we can successfully introduce Ellen White in such a way that her work immediately and meaningfully speaks into the QPAs of emerging generations, then they will stop. They will turn around. They will pay attention.
What Does This Look Like?
Here’s where you come in. Because the truth is, there is no one set of QPAs that young people share across the board today. Postmodernism fractured social cohesion. And what this means is there is no such thing as one way to be postmodern or one way to be secular. The fracturing means that postmodern generations share vastly different QPAs depending on geography, demographics, even economic class.
Which means the first step isn’t actually some new EGW slideshow. The first step is to listen. To listen to your young people and to begin to identify what their specific QPAs are. And I have a simple rule for this: aim to understand twice as much as you wish to be understood. Because if you can go deep into your young people’s world and really, truly understand what their QPAs are, then introducing Ellen White to those QPAs will be a walk in the park. But if you don’t listen carefully, if you don’t understand, then introducing her will always feel like an uphill struggle for attention.
Please hear me when I say this: the solution isn’t a nicer PowerPoint presentation with modern graphics. It’s not an expensive film with tons of production quality. It’s not even updating her books to more modern English. I’m not saying these things don’t matter or shouldn’t be done. I’m just saying they are not the solution. When I was a youth pastor giving Bible studies, I noticed a lot of young people didn’t connect with the materials I was bringing from the ABC. So I started to write my own. My studies had no graphics, no colors, and were printed on plain printer paper with 12 point Arial font.
Young people loved them anyway.
I learned something valuable from this: young people aren’t interested in fancy graphics and cool looking resources as much as we think they are. What they engage with is when a topic or theme dances meaningfuly with their QPAs.
Do that and they pay attention. Don’t do that, and no amount of smoke, lasers, and graphic design is going to save you.
But Is There a Starting Point?
OK, now that you know that young people have diverse QPAs and that the key is to listen to them first and learn from them, allow me to give you a list of QPAs that are common today. But please understand, this list is just here to illustrate what I mean. DO NOT take this and start writing EGW curriculums because your specific youth might not care about any of this. These are themes I have seen come up repeatedly, but they don’t work everywhere with all youth.
Nevertheless, these are common and might be help you picture what I am advocating a little better:
Theme #1: Race Relations
Like it or not, we live in an era of social justice. And young people, by and large, care very deeply about this topic. It’s a common QPA, especially among university aged youth but also among teens. There is a lot of controversy over this topic in the general public. The left has its views. The right has its views. And youth are caught in the middle, oftentimes choosing a side and going to war with the other. This is also a topic alive and well inside our denomination and it goes all the way back to Ellen White’s day — when the Civil War, followed by the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves, took place.
And guess what? Ellen White had a lot to say about racism, equality, and human dignity. Which means if you gather a group of young people for whom this is a QPA and say, “Today we are going to explore the topic of racism from a gospel perspective”, you will definitely have their attention. And if you split them into smaller groups each reading what the Bible and Ellen White had to say on the topic and then have them share what they learned from her at the end, you will have had a room full of youth who stopped, turned around and paid attention.
Theme #2: Mental Health
Anxiety, depression, burnout, loneliness and even religious trauma — these aren’t fringe issues for younger generations. They are big issues.
The cool part? Ellen White wrote tons on this. Not only that, she had a framework for mental health that resonates deeply with what psychotherapists emphasize today — a holistic view that sees the mind and body as deeply connected. She advocated for rest, for time in nature, for the importance of joy and meaningful work as part of a healthy life. She pushed back against the kind of grim, joyless religion that produces guilt and shame rather than freedom and vitality. And even though hustle culture didn’t exist in her day, her views on Sabbath are a direct resistance to the modern capitalist push to produce more and more at the expense of health and family.
So if you gather a group of young people for whom mental health is a big QPA and open with something like “Let’s talk about mental health”, you have the room. And when you bring in what Ellen White wrote on it, you are introducing them to a voice they can find refuge in — someone they can feel seen by.
Theme #3: The Environment
Climate anxiety is so widespread among younger generations that entire studies have been dedicated to understanding it. And these studies consistently show that a significant portion of young people report feeling afraid, hopeless, or overwhelmed about the state of the planet. This is a live QPA for a generation that has grown up watching the conversation about environmental collapse move from fringe concern to mainstream crisis.
Ellen White wrote about the natural world with a depth that a lot of religious folk often ignore. She saw nature as one of God’s primary classrooms — a place where the character of God is revealed and the human soul is restored. She advocated for connection with the created world, for a way of living that honors rather than exploits the earth. Long before environmental ethics became a conversation, she was writing about the relationship between how humans treat the natural world and their own spiritual and physical wellbeing.
If you open a conversation with young people around their grief and anxiety about the environment and then introduce them to what Ellen White actually wrote about the natural world — you will likely surprise them. Because she doesn’t sound like a 19th century religious figure on this topic. She sounds like someone who understood something most of the church is still ignoring.
One More Time — Don’t Skip the Listening
I want to end where I started this section. These three themes are illustrations. They are not a curriculum. Your young people might care deeply about all three. They might care about none of them. They might be consumed by something else entirely — financial anxiety, questions about sexuality and identity, the loneliness epidemic, the meaning crisis that comes with living in an AI-saturated world.
The themes don’t matter as much as the posture. Listen first. Understand their QPAs before you talk about Ellen White. And when you do introduce her, introduce her as someone who has something to say about the things they already care about — not as an authority figure demanding compliance, but as a voice worth hearing because she saw clearly into things that still matter.
That’s phase one. Awakening curiosity.
But phase one, at best, only gets youth to stop running away from Ellen White. It doesn’t necessarily translate to youth leaning in to her work and ministry. That’s phase two which we’ll explore next week.
For now, a question: What are the QPAs of the young people in your life right now — and have you ever thought about how Ellen White might speak into them?
