Adventist Church in Costa Rica Inaugurates Radio Studio, Offices

Libna Stevens, Inter-American Division, and Adventist World

Seventh-day Adventist leaders in the South Central American Union Mission (SCAUM) inaugurated studios and offices of Radio Lira, a radio station operated by the Adventist Church, during a special ceremony in Alajuela, Costa Rica, on March 13. Officials of Adventist World Radio (AWR), a General Conference radio ministry, and regional administrators reflected on how God had led them to the 9.8-acre (nearly four-hectare) property overlooking the city of Alajuela.

“This is a miracle from God,” SCAUM president Ricardo Marin said. Marin thanked AWR for signing over the property. “We praise God for His goodness and vow to continue spreading the gospel of salvation,” he said.

A Unique Relationship With Awr

Radio Lira, established in 1983, has a unique relationship with AWR, one of its general vice presidents, Ray Allen, said. “This [property] used to be the center of AWR for this region,” Allen said. “I remember programs produced here . . . being broadcast shortwave to all Spanish-speaking countries.” The studio building was the AWR headquarters of the Americas, Allen explained, serving the Inter-American and South American divisions of the Adventist Church.

According to Allen, they tried to sell the property in 2004 because several AWR offices had to close in the region. “Anyone who came to look at it would say, ‘No, that’s not for me,’ and we wondered, How come? Look how beautiful . . . How can you resist a land like this? But

God kept this land as if saying, This site needs to be retained so you can continue to proclaim the gospel.

In a sense, Allen said, “this is a reinauguration. We have been here before with God, and today once again with God. May God continue to bless this property so the love embodied in the three angels’ messages can reach many more souls for God.”

The signing for the property took place in 2022 at AWR headquarters in the General Conference building, in Maryland, United States. Marin publicly thanked AWR president Duane McKey and former IAD president Israel Leito, who were instrumental in the transfer process.

Spreading The Gospel

Leaders believe that God preserved the property and its purpose for mission. “Everything we do should be about preaching this beautiful message of salvation, and we vow as a church to continue advancing and growing,” Marin said.

SCAUM communication director Royner Ramirez oversees production at Radio Lira, along with a production director, a program director, a marketing director, and an assistant production director. Together they keep the station running 24 hours a day.

“We want to set up a proper Hope media center right here on this property to target viewers who need to know about Jesus and His love,” Ramirez said. A small television studio has been set up, but plans are being made for a complete media center.

“GOD’S BOOMERANG EFFECT”

Miguel Lara, who has been employed at Radio Lira for nearly two decades, said it is surreal to be back on the property doing what he has loved to do for so many years. He began working there as a student when he was 19 years old.

“I consider it a privilege to be part of a place where so much has been produced to spread the message of hope,” Lara said.

In a sense, Radio Lira is following in the footsteps of AWR, taking steps where AWR left off, Allen said. “I call it ‘God’s boomerang effect,’ where it all circles back.”

On ChatGPT, Education, and Compassion

Artificial intelligence must move from being datadriven to value-driven.

During a recent training I attended on crisis management, our instructor spent an inordinate amount of time praising ChatGPT. As I had no idea what he was referring to, I sneakily looked it up on my phone. ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer, is basically a chatbot, software used for online chat conversations, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and designed by OpenAI, a research laboratory in California, United States. ChatGPT can provide you with strikingly humanlike answers to any prompt.

But there is more! ChatGPT can write computer programs and compose music. It can even write essays and poetry. Demonstrating both its simplicity to use and powerful outcome, our instructor gave us a demo. All he did was connect ChatGPT to Google Forms and asked it to write the index for a paper on “crisis management” and some paragraphs too. After waiting just a couple of a seconds, voilà! In front of us was a remarkably coherent and accurate text.

Copyright Matters

After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I asked what any author worth his/her soul would have asked: “What about copyright?” After all, ChatGPT was trained using a massive quantity of data from the Internet, some of which is copyrighted material. It turns out this is somewhat of a gray area.

At present, it is unclear if ChatGPT alters original works sufficiently to avoid copyright infringements. What’s clear is that OpenAI is not liable for damages. So if users are faced with a lawsuit, they are pretty much on their own.

Copyright implications aside, one thing is for sure: with Google also releasing its own chatbot named Bard, AI has become a part of our daily lives, now more than ever.

Some Implications For Education

Almost everyone in my family is a teacher. So, unsurprisingly, once the training was over, my mind went straight to implications for education. Picking up the phone, I called my twin sister, Inés, who is a headteacher at a bilingual school in Argentina.

We talked for a while about how AI will force educational institutions to rethink plagiarism. But soon we were navigating deeper waters, discussing assessment criteria and the core goals of education.

“I think AI developments will force us to focus even more on emotional literacy and critical thinking,” my sister said. “In a time when a computer can give you an answer in a nanosecond, our emphasis must be on discernment, not content regurgitation.”

WHAT ABOUT THE CHURCH?

As a church, we have often taken the simplistic approach of demonizing new technologies when faced with complex scenarios such as this. I believe this is a terrible mistake. First, such technology is not going to disappear, but also, the longer we delay engagement, the more vulnerable we are to potential abuses and less able to impact society for good. After all, unless the salt mixes with the food, it cannot give it flavor!

In addition, we must advocate for the value of compassion as a key component of AI. Compassion is not a word often associated with it. But I hope one day it will be. At least, it could be if we start teaching AI literacy and ethics. We can ensure that AI developments like ChatGPT significantly improve our lives and our society. Compassionate AI is not only possible but also absolutely necessary.

Only then will AI be able to make a significant contribution to our mission.