Madrid, Spain [Pedro Torres, Communications & Public Affairs Director in Spain; CD EUDNews]. On these years Spain has developed a News Agency at the Union feeding ANN-Spain, establishing the first Press Room service at the Union to attend the media professionals.
In the past, the Union counted with 9 radio stations all over Spain, but with no regular structure. Since then now we can count with 13 radio stations belonging to the church, and 2 more stations privately managed. The regulation and legalization of these stations is on process due to the undeveloped spaniard laws. We are working to set up a Federation of Radio Associations to give one single legal and corporative structure to all of them.
On this way of expansion, some volunteers who want to keep anonymity, asked for help due to our strategical situation in the North of Africa, where we could set up several radio stations that could reach the Maghreb with broadcasts. We presented to AWR and MENA a project which would include 5 radio stations and 2 missionary stations in Spain territory but close to the borders of Africa.
Since then 2 radio stations have been installed and operating in Canary Islands and Ceuta, that have been broadcasting over 2 and 3 years respectively, reaching over 2.000 km of coast in Maghreb and the main cities in there. (note that we can not give more details for security)
The staff we count on with is only 9 people in CPM, but just 3 of them are working in radio, and a volunteer who is helping with logistics in these areas. This development forced us to design a structure of live streaming and local disconnections for the whole network, so in certain hours, every station is disconnected from the network so it can broadcast local contents in Spain mainland, and in other languages such as arabic, berber, french, english, and other upcoming languages, trying to preach the gospel to every nation tribe and tongue in its own language.
AWR provided also contents in different languages, as well as other contents due to the former ATMA media center before disappeared, to whom we are very thankful. AWR sought this model of networking as something interesting to be shared in the hispanic world of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, sharing it with the AWR personnel from all South America and Inter America Divisions last december 2012 on the Hemispheric Congress of AWR.
It is very difficult to evaluate the results of this work in the North Africa side, due to obvious fears from people living in neighbor countries. Most of them are afraid to show up as christians believers avoiding the risk of being prosecuted, jailed or even murdered. Some of these listeners maintain contact through mail with a person in central Europe and are receiving Bible studies, some of them that may cross the borders through Ceuta and Melilla, are attended by the Bible Society personnel in these two cities regardless the denomination.
There's a case of a man who crossed three countries by car to enter in Senegal, searched a Seventh Day Adventist Church and asked for baptism. None knows in his family about his decision, we pray God to keep him. There's another man whose voice can be heard through the waves, that had to run for his life due to recognition of him. Today, february 14th makes a year of a brutal beating and stabbing on him. Since then he had to hide himself from crowded places and cities. Praise God he's willing to keep working on production area from "the other side". Recently one of the neighbor countries denounced 2 of our radio stations, but thank God, the situation was successfully solved, and we keep bringing the tree angel's message through the waves freely overopen sky, where there are no borders.
Pedro Torres was appointed as the CPM (Media Center) of the Spanish Union of Churches, and Radio Adventista director on june 2009. In January 2010 he was appointed also as interim communications director for the Spanish Union of Churches, and as the Communications Techniques professor at the Adventist Theology College in Sagunto.
On April 2012, at the Union Session he was elected as the Communications Director, Public Relations Director, General Secretary for the ADLR (spanish branch of AIDLR) keeping all the former positions but dropping the CPM direction in favor of Pablo Sanchez.
"We are proud of our spanish communication staff!", so Corrado Cozzi, EUD Communications Director. "We are working hard to set up a great european communication network, in order to accomplish the mission that God has given us. The european communication Team is growing in faith, in know how and in professional skills. We thank the Lord for this and we promise to work even harder for the mission."
The spanish Adventist Union counts 108 Churches, with 16349 members.
pictures: Spanish AWR Logo (Spanish Union); spanish CPM Team and Pedro Torres (spanish Communication Department);
