Work Samples

When the International Pathfinder Camporee moved to Gillette, Wyoming, residents were divided on how the event would impact the rural town. - Read Here

Part 1 - Read Here

Part 2 - Read Here

In a 2011 survey of former Seventh-day Adventist Church members, 62.5 percent of respondents reported that they were young adults when they left the Adventist church. The issue has been the subject of countless debates, articles, sermons, and initiatives. For this story, Spectrum interviewed 16 young adults who left the church and 5 who are still in the church. In an attempt to listen beyond the statistics, some of their stories are recounted here. [CLICK HERE TO READ]

Boredom led to the inception of the controversial Instagram page “AU Confessions” in September 2019. Christopher Mata, then a freshman at Andrews University, had come up with the idea of starting an anonymous “confessions” outlet after hearing his friends criticize another campus social media page that “trash talked the chapels and complained.”

At first, he ignored the idea. But sitting in his room, bored out of his mind, he romanticized the idea and eventually succumbed to it. He created the Instagram page—whose name was intended to evoke a sense of edginess—and it was quickly followed by many of his fellow students on campus.

The page took off, earning additional followers as soon as it launched. The first confession, submitted on September 20, 2019, shared how a student had gotten through the university cafeteria for two weeks without using their student ID. Always anonymous, each confession revealed something enticingly unknown yet (usually) not obscenely scandalous.

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On January 16, 2024, Dave Ferguson met with Geoff Patterson, senior pastor of the Boulder Seventh-day Adventist Church in Colorado, and Mark Johnson, its board chair. Ferguson and his husband, Peter, had been part of the congregation for almost a year, and he felt it was appropriate to request to transfer his membership there. “Is this going to be a problem?” Ferguson recalled asking the two church leaders.  

They didn’t think so. “We have probably been more welcoming than most Adventist churches,” Johnson said of the church’s acceptance of LGBTQ people. 

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On a summer day in 2018, Zachariah Dulcich stepped from a car onto a residential street corner outside of Salt Lake City. Dulcich, then a 15-year-old high school student from Bakersfield, California, had been working that summer distributing Adventist literature by knocking on doors from early afternoon into the evening. For five days a week, he had been offering books on a “donation basis,” carrying a bag stuffed with print material including The Great Controversy and Christ’s Object Lessons by Ellen G. White as well as copies of a plant-based cookbook and Storytime, which features 96 pages of “character-building classics” for children. 

On this particular day, Dulcich had been assigned an accompanying trainee as he canvassed suburban neighborhoods. “I was just basically supposed to walk him through and explain what I'm going to do before I do it,” Dulcich said. The duo approached the first house of the day and noticed a “No Soliciting” sign. Their training told them to knock anyway since they were offering the books in exchange for “donations.” 

“If there’s a screen door, step back when they open it,” Dulcich explained to the new colporteur. “That’s their space.” Extending his arm, he demonstrated, “Put the book right in their stomach, so they automatically reach for it.” The preliminaries completed, they stood on the doorstep and waited.

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