Ethics for Communicators

The Discipline of Telling the Truth: Communication moves fast—and trust can be lost just as quickly. What is said and how it is said matter more than ever. This webinar features special guest Ray Tetz, Director of Communication and Community Engagement at the Pacific Union Conference.

With moderator Laurie Trujillo, Communication Director for the Northern California Conference, Ray will unpack an ethical framework for Christian communicators—focused on telling the truth, staying mission-centered, being on message, and communicating with clarity and purpose.

Because communicators don’t just share messages—they represent and embody the identity of the organizations they serve.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome. Thanks for joining this Clear Voice webinar today. Whether you're serving at a church, school, or ministry, what you do in communication matters. It is how we are as communicators, connecting people to mission, building trust, and inspiring action. And this action helps us to connect people with the power of the Holy Spirit to a more abundant life with Jesus Christ and prepare them for the second coming. My name is Lori Trujillo. I am the assistant to the president, Mark Woodson, for communication and development. Just to do a little bit of housekeeping, if this is the first time you've been on, questions and comments are entered into the comment section area of this platform. Go ahead and take a look. It's going to be up on the right hand side. And if you need to leave early, no problem. This session is being recorded and it will send you an on-demand link. You can also find our podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Look for NCC Clear Voice. So today I am super excited that my mentor and good friend Ray Tetz, who is the director of communication and community engagement at the Pacific Union Conference, is joining us today. We will be discussing how ethics for Christian communicators is the discipline of telling the truth in ways that protects dignity, preserves trust, and serves the mission. Ray, welcome and thank you so very much for being with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Thanks for the invitation, Lori. And I'm really pleased to be here and to be a part of this. I want to just commend Lori and the North Northern California Conference for sponsoring this series of events. I think is unique and it's uh very special that this is happening, that you're participating. And I appreciate your kindness and letting me talk about something that's very uh, I think important to the work of a communicator. In fact, not just the work of the communicator, but how communicators think about themselves and how we think about the mission of the church. So um Lori shared with you what I consider to be the anchor thesis, which is that ethics is really the discipline of telling the truth in ways that protect dignity, preserve trust, and serve the mission of the organization. In this case, that's the church. Truthfully, however, you've known this for a long time. You probably learned about um ethics, uh, whether you knew it or not. The first time you sang that hymn that starts out, I will be true, for there are those who trust me. And in fact, I can't think of a better summary statement for uh ethics than that. It's got it all right there. And we probably could just talk about that for a half hour. Uh, and I'm just gonna break it down. I, it's ethics is personal, will be, it's active. True, it's got to do with your character, your integrity. I will be true, for there are those, it's relational, who trust me. It's based in trust. And that's the entire story. Break out any of those things, think that it's not about you, think that it's not active, think that it's not about integrity, think that it's not relational, or think that it's not about your truthfulness and your integrity and the trust that you established with other people, and you failed to live out ethics in a positive and a powerful way. Now, I personally think that ethics stands at the very, very heart of what a Christian communicator does. And one of the reasons this is such an important and difficult topic for us is because as a mission-based organization and as someone who works with a mission-based organization who has given their lives to a mission-based organization, and this could be a church or it could be a hospital or a school or a charity, but any organization which you take on the mission of that organization and not just take a paycheck, but you're actually becoming a part of what that organization is trying to achieve in the world, you take on a special responsibility because you represent not just yourself. And hopefully there's no real gap between yourself and the organization that you represent, but you represent the organization itself. You are the identity of the organization, you are the embodiment of the organization. And so ethics is different than journalistic ethics, where uh journalists live by a journalistic code which goes beyond the organization that they happen to be working to, or you know, um an organization where the ethics are defined by uh uh a professional discipline like uh legal ethics, where law, the law, and the way you serve a client are um are what determines the way your ethical behavior goes, or a physician who's governed by by the same sort of ethical constraints. Your ethical constraints have to do with the the discipline of telling the truth, and doing that in a way that constantly is aware of the dignity of the people that you're you're representing and also uh that you're interacting with, that that protects and builds and preserves and uh helps to develop the trust that you have with with the people around you and within your organization with your audiences, and finally, that it's always mission-centered, it's always focused on the mission. Now, uh I personally work off a 12-point ethical framework. I don't have this memorized, I don't carry it around on a piece of paper in my wallet. I do think that it's Why not?

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Why not?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

These are things that we just start to know, just like you know you want certain things to be in your life, that you want certain things to always be true. These are so fundamental that if you have to look them up, there's a problem, which is why the I will be true statement is is so important. That's the it's the basis for your the way you do your work, the way you conduct yourself, the way you present yourself, and the way you present the organization that you're representing. So I'm just gonna run through these really quickly and talk about them just a little bit. None of them are gonna surprise you. There's nothing here that is outside of what you already understand. What makes this an ethical framework is that you bring them together in a way consistently that says you can depend on these. These are like the elements of the universe that I live in. These are the building blocks of the way in which the reality that I'm constructing for people is understood. These are, in fact, are the building blocks of the way I understand my own life and what's important to me and what I think should be important to other people. So, number one, as a Christian communicator, tell the truth. Now, sometimes we are called on to be uh spokespersons to speak about situations where the truth is not the easiest thing to talk about. Not always are we representing the church at its best. Sometimes we have to repres uh represent people that are in a in a difficult circumstances where there's conflict or where there's uh uh dissent between each other. Even there, and especially there, your job is to tell the truth and to be to be transparent. Number two is to aim for fairness and balance, not just your truth, not just the truth that's gonna help you out, not just the facts are gonna help build your case, but what's truthful, what's fair, what's balanced. How can people better understand this? The the whole idea of ethics is that it creates an environment where your truth and the way you express it can be understood by other people in a useful way, and not just in a useful way, in a way that gives them a chance to build out a truthful and a useful world in which they can live. And frankly, it gives them a way to understand the organization that you represent. Number three, be honest and be transparent. Don't hide things, don't pretend that things don't exist that do exist. Don't act as if you don't have to deal with the problems that do exist. We're not perfect. Um we're not, we're we're called to be perfectly dependent on God. And that means to be perfectly suited to be his voice, not to pretend as if the world is perfect or that we're perfect, or even if the church is perfect. It's far from it. Number four, and I think this maybe should be number one, value integrity above everything. Uh, integrity is the coin of the realm. You lose integrity and you devalue everything else that you say. If people can't believe you because your words don't have integrity, or because your answers don't have integrity, or because what you choose to tell them or not choose to tell them is not entirely truthful, you've got nothing. You've got nothing. Uh, you have to you have to know that once that's taken away, once you've surrendered integrity by being less than honest, or by being less than forthright, or being less than transparent, or even by being less than balanced, you start to give people a reason to say, I don't think I trust what they're saying. And if I don't trust what they're saying, I don't have to believe that anything they're talking about, including the organization they represent and the mission that they represent, is truthful. Number five, protect trust on both sides or on all sides. Uh almost always there's an antagonistic relationship in the things existing someplace in the relationship that you're trying to talk about. And we have lots of ways in which we divide up the world. We divide it into old and young and rich and poor and uh by race and by culture and by money and by age and by culture, by politic, by belief system. There's lots of ways in which we can divide the world up. The world is, and you know this, it's increasingly divisive. Your job as a communicator is to protect the way trust can be built between these diverse and various groups of people. That doesn't mean that people have to be the same as you. That means that that you are approaching them with trust and that you're going to treat them with trust and with respect. Number six, and I think this is really important because sometimes in communication we think we want to get the upper hand. You don't want to have the upper hand. You want to be known as fair. Act with compassion is number six. Be fair to the people around you. Don't tell a story that will help help you, but will harm another person, or diminish another person, or embarrass another person. Um, frankly, with working with uh people in public media is when they don't feel like compassion is a value, and that they feel like getting the upper hand is more important, getting the story told is more important. You almost always know when those people are there in the room, and you stop, you you begin to not trust them. The best journalists that I know, the best reporters I've worked with, and I've worked with a lot in my in my life, both print journalists and and visual journalists, uh television people, are people who recognize that that they are dealing with a human relationship and that the compassion and and fairness and the and just sort of that compassion uh component that every person wants and needs is is just as important to the person they're speaking to as it is uh to them. Uh number seven, avoid causing harm. Now, sometimes you'll know you'll know things that you know might make your job easier if you talk about it or if you share it. And you also know that by sharing it, you might possibly make somebody else feel less important, less uh credible, uh, more threatened, less reliable. If it's not germane to the transparency of the situation, don't don't uh sort of casually allow harm to be expressed. Don't interject things that are not helpful. Keep keep those details that might help help you, but not but and might hurt another person to yourself. I'm not talking about uh not being honest or transparent, I'm talking about those things which don't have to be introduced into the into the conversation, but that are introduced because you're because somebody's trying to get uh uh the advantage over somebody else. Number eight, uh operate from high moral standards. Uh whether people believe you're in your same or our same uh uh set of values, whether they operate as Christians or as non-Christians or as former Christians or as uh as non-religious people or as people that are motivated by other uh political systems or religious systems, regardless of what that is, there is a there's a shared morality where we don't do it's the way the doctors say, first do no harm. Operate from a high moral uh standard. Don't take advantage of the situation just because you can. And frankly, given the given the chance to speak and to be the voice of uh an organization, to be the person that people turn to in a crisis where they're looking for information, just having access to data can give you a sense that you have some sort of power that's yours. It's not yours, it's something that's been entrusted to you, and the way you handle that is exactly what determines not just you and your effectiveness, but the effectiveness of your of your organization. So operate from a high moral uh calling in terms of the way you treat that information. Strive for excellence. Uh write it out, be careful what you print, double check it, uh re reset up the shot if it's if it embarrasses people. Don't don't shoot people in an embarrassing way. If someone's wearing a switch sweatshirt in a crisis that's got something printed on it that you don't want, that they don't want to have to see later, don't shoot that picture. Don't take pictures of people in embarrassing situations or are in situations that um are compromising as to who they are. I spent close to 40 years of my life working in international development, which meant that I worked with very, very poor people. I did media for very poor people in very compromised situations. I can tell you that the pornography of poverty, where you make a person look poor, where you where you diminish their humanity because they don't look like you, or because they don't have the access that you do to the things that you've got, is only just one way in which you diminish your message itself. The the best way to tell a person's story is to tell that story in the way that you would want that story told about yourself. And you're gonna want to tell that story in the best possible with the highest possible standards of excellence. Use good equipment, take clear pictures, write clear copy, um, have a proofreader, go through those kinds of things, check your message points. And if you make a mistake, say, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. This is what I do mean. Apologize, be a be accountable for yourself. Uh, number 10, defend and appreciate freedom. Recognize that people have a choice, that uh that you don't control anybody, that you don't compel anybody, that you're compelled by your your inner values, the things that make you tick, the things that that make you proud of what you do, the things that make you proud to be your the parent of your children, that's those things are that they can't be replaced. And they should be defended and appreciated in other people as well. So when you're telling somebody else a story, if it's in a crisis or if it's just a uh a story about somebody in any kind of circumstance, if if you tell that story in a way that protects their identity, appreciates who they are, their their agency, who they are, and and frankly, defends them from being used or exploited because the story is is gonna be useful to you, defends their freedom, frankly, then you've done you've done a great deal of work towards establishing the rapport and the integrity with that individual that's gonna create a trustworthy environment for the story to be told. Number 11, respect the views of others. We don't have to to dis to agree with one another, but we don't have to be disagreeable about that either. Just because there are people who uh represent uh viewpoints that we don't appreciate or viewpoints that we uh question, if you feel like you can't tell the story of a person whose viewpoint is different than yours, take yourself out of the story. Don't make yourself the person that tells that person's story. Every person deserves their story to be told in a fair and honest way. And if you're not able to respect the people that you're talking to and tell their story in a way that if it was your story, you'd want it to be told. You're not the right storyteller. And that's going to be known by the people who hear and listen or read that story. We're very good at interpreting stories. It's the thing that we know the best how to do. We learn how to watch television early, early on. We listen to the way stories are told once upon a time, are those words that introduce us into this sort of magical world in which we all know how it's supposed to work. When it doesn't work that way, we start to smell a rat. We start to know it's not truthful, we start to know it's not authentic, it doesn't have the gravitas that reality and truthfulness has. People want the things that they know about you, the things they know about your mission, the things they know about the church, about the gospel to be grounded in things that really matter. The foundational thing is the integrity and the truthfulness. And respecting other people's views is the primary way in which you can be perhaps more assured that people are gonna be respectful of your views as well, and that they're gonna represent your story faithfully when they tell that story. Truthfully, many of the times that you are representing the organization, you're doing that to people who are then going to tell that story to somebody else. They're gonna tell it on television, they're gonna tell it in print, they're gonna tell it in a sermon, they're gonna tell it to their neighbors, they're gonna, they're gonna talk about it after church around the table. If you've respected other people, excuse me, let me say it differently. If you've disrespected other people in the way you've told other people's stories, you can fully expect that that same disrespect will be extended to you in the way your story is told. The best, the best assurity that you have is that that people will respect your story and tell it with fairness, is that you, in fact, have told the story fairly and that you've respected other people. And then the last thing is to not sell out, maintain independence and your own personal responsibility. You don't behave these ways because someone else told you to do it or because you're working for your paycheck. You do this just because of who you are. If these things are not true about you, then get out of the business. Don't do it. Don't represent something that you don't believe in, something that you can't be fair about. Now, I'm not saying that you have to support everything that the organization that you represent does. I'm not saying that you have to sign a code. I am saying that in the main, in terms of the mission, in terms of the value that an organization wants to bring to the world, you have to be able to fairly represent that organization and not represent yourself. And if you can't do that, then you need to step away and let somebody else tell that story. Those are the 12 uh pieces in the framework, the things that go together to build the house of ethics that I think we all have to live in. Frankly, one of the things that differentiates ethics for the Christian communicator from perhaps other people is that for us, all of us, ethics is an editorial stewardship of the resource that we've been given to represent the gospel. We're being, we're being stewards of the of the story of Jesus. We're being stewards of the mission of the church, we're being story, uh stewards of the story of how how God's love has changed the lives of the people around us, or the way that that uh failure has impacted the people around us. So if you want to use the old world sin or evil has impacted the people around us, or impacted us. We have to be stewards of that process so that God's love. Can be known and can be can be uh portrayed. So that means we take really good care of relationships. We put we put um uh clarity of mission at the very top of our list in terms of the way we want to talk, and we are constantly aware of the advocacy that we have as spokespersons, as advocates for that, of the centrality of that task as opposed to anything else that we want to do. So that is um that's Ray.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Can I interrupt you?

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

I would love um, and I and I we're we're kind of coming to the end of this recording, but what I think as I'm hearing these 12 steps and with the years of experience that you've had, uh do you have a personal story in which these ethics maybe came in contrast with each other or caused problems or any kind of personal, just something that you know, because you've been in a lot of stories throughout the the Avenist Church. And I don't know if you if you could share one with us.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Well, I'll I'll share a couple of stories. Um two stand out uh very vividly for me. Uh I was asked or I was able to be involved with the church in trying to extract our story, ourselves from the Waco crisis. Yay, all these many years ago when the Waco um problem first exist, when David Koresh uh, you know, was in this terrible, terrible thing that happened. And the Avenist Church was was bound right up in the middle of it. Um a week after Waco, the the church's identity was literally just on fire. Um the there were thousands of individual. I think I can't remember the numbers now, it's been a long time, but I think it was in the neighborhood of 22,000 individual press entries on this on the Saturday after Waco.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

22,000. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

22,000. And if you want to compare that to the to the one year to the Sabbath or the 52 weeks prior to that, there had been four mentions of Adventism in the press. So uh it was really, we were in a lot of trouble. And um we sent a um, I was helping to sort of stop the bleeding, if you would, and we sent a media specialist, uh, not an aventist, but an expert in religious crisis communication to Waco to the church service there, because we didn't know what was going to happen. And what happened was our our fears were well founded because there was about a half a dozen media crews right at church. And um I remember he this was the days before cell phones, he called me from the lobby of the church and he was hyperventilating because the um the pastor had wanting to be friendly, had said to the uh people that were there, including the media crew, want to invite all you folk to come in. We're not gonna be serving any grape Kool-Aid, which was a which was a reference to the Jim Jones massacre that had just happened a few years from previous. So he was already putting himself in a really uh difficult circumstance. And our our media specialist, he was literally hyperventilating, he was so upset about it. I had to tell him to put his head down and breathe so he could speak to me.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

And um, after church, several church leaders saw this as a great opportunity to be interviewed by media people, and even though we had agreed on some media statements and some statements, there was one or two uh leaders who were determined they were going to talk to the press. They were determined they were gonna be their face was gonna be part of the story. And at one point, um the the man who sent down there, his name was Hampton. Hampton told me that he had spoken to a church leader so clearly about not representing the church or himself in a way that would be explosive or complicate the story. Or I mean, at that point, we didn't know anything really. All we did know was that they were not Avenists in the compound and that the Adventist church had nothing to do with what had happened. That was the only message we had. This is not us. Uh, this leader had volunteered to say, I can tell you about cults. This leader had volunteered to say, I know a lot about these people because I knew them when I was, I knew people like this in college. He was spinning yarns, really, because he was so interested in getting to be part of the story. Hampton actually put himself physically, I mean, he put himself physically between the the avenue leader and the person with the camera.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

And he turned to the to the reporter and said, Please don't do this. You know that this is not fair. You know this is not the story. I'm asking you as a professional not to do this. And the reporter looked at him and took the microphone down and said, You're right. This is not the story. I can't use the story. And he turned away. Well, the leader was furious because we'd interrupted this media opportunity. But Hampton was behaving on behalf of ethics to say, this is not the way we tell stories, this is not the way we behave, this is not creating uh understanding, this is not creating a better uh appreciation for the people that were harmed. In fact, if anything, it was exploiting those things. And so he had to physically interrupt that. For me, that was a very telling example of a man who acting on our behalf, acting as a on our mission, which was to extract the church from that story, said to the professionals around him, We act that you be, we ask that you behave in an ethical manner. So ethics really does come into um into play in a situation like that. So that's that's uh perhaps an example of the rubber hitting the road. Now that's a real super uh crisis. But we've all been in situations where uh reporters call up, or at least I've been in situations where reporters call up and they act friendly and they ask questions in a really, you know, sort of open-minded way. They want to go to lunch with you, they want to tell you how you're how wonderful your work is, and then they start to ask you questions that are clearly leading away or leading into conversations that are not about the story itself. The only, the only defense you have right then is to just be truthful and to stay on the target, stay, stay focused, to be transparent and to be honest, say, well, frankly, that's not something I can talk to you about or will talk to you about. And if they say why not, they say so because it's only gonna create harm and we're not gonna create harm.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

My own experience is that 60% of the 70% of the time, it stops right then. There might be somebody that pushes a little farther, and they're not gonna push past that sort of unethical behavior because they themselves know that they're gonna have to answer for that behavior eventually. They don't want to get a letter to their editor or their boss saying you behave this way. They don't want us to say that's not true. They don't want to have to issue a denial for something that they can't substantiate. So the closer everybody stays to the center of the story and stays focused on the story, the better that we are. We you know this, Lori. In um in Feather River, after the shooting, the sheriff bite uh was clearly not working for us. He didn't ask you for the message points, he didn't ask you for any data at all. But when store when when questions came to him during the news conference and also when in when individual reporters, the reporters from the Sacramento Bee, the reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle, even the reporters from the New York Times spoke to him, he he was resolute in refusing to allow that story to branch out into many of the other conversations that it could. He never allowed the story to become about homeschooling. He never allowed the story to come to become about unlicensed guns. He never allowed the story to come become about immigrants or about uh uh unhoused individuals. He never let the story uh become about anything except for this terrible tragedy that had not that should not have happened, and that they were doing everything they could as a community to stop the impact of. We were very blessed to have an ethical sheriff in that situation who who, frankly, and I recall, he called on everyone around him to behave in the same ethical manner. And when he did that, people responded. And those people that didn't respond, they found themselves very quickly on the outside of his conversation. He didn't that he wouldn't give them the time of day because he knew that they were distracting. So I mean, it that's another really I God forbid that we have to ever deal with a situation like that again. But for the most part, ethics, it's like the it's like the coin. It's like the it's the it's the currency that you can use for working with one another. And its integrity is based on how you what you bring to the table and how faithful you're willing to be to that.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Right. Thank you, Ray, so much for your time today. You have so much knowledge, expertise, and uh, we do encourage those who are listening that um if you've got questions, if things happen in your church or in school, we do ask that you pause and reach out. Uh, Ray is part of my team here at the conference, and so we work to strategize, we work you, we support with, we support you. And so we want you to know that you have a resource here and that we're able to tap into these kinds of experiences. You can see my contact below. So we really appreciate Ray your time. Do you have any parting words before we let the audience go to lunch?

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Well, the only thing that would be to say what you just said, which is don't uh think that you're in this by yourself. Um all of us have been in situations where we feel alone and and we're the the burden of uh of a situation or a story or a crisis weighs heaven, and you know things about it that no one else will ever know or understand. Um we do have here, we're very thankful that here in the Pacific Union, we have a very uh well-rehearsed and well-developed and well adhered to set of policies about the way we speak to one another, the way we speak about one another, and the way we support one another. And so our first impulse is going to be to help and to do that quickly, efficiently, and frankly, at no expense to you. We we have um really terrific resources that we can bring to just about any circumstance. And uh I'm so thankful. I mean, I think it's providence that in the 10 years that I've been doing crisis communication as the director here, and we have we we have them on an almost daily basis, but at least on a weekly basis. There's only been two or three times when the story took a bad turn, a turn that we couldn't predict. And those two or three times were only because we didn't we didn't uh adhere to our own set of values and our own set of rules.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

So it we've been we've had self-inflicted problems one or two times because someone within the system said I'm smarter than that. That's not the case. And the the number one mistake is to think that you're by yourself. You're not. There's people that will help you, and they're gonna do that in a way. And the other thing is, frankly, I have a very short memory. Um, I try and not keep this stuff in my brain. Uh, the details are there, it's not important to me to know that. It's important to me to know that you're better or that the situation is better, that the people have been not hurt. Uh, we don't keep score of wrongs here. We we we really want to just keep moving. And so we're not you should there shouldn't be embarrassment about being in a situation. The embarrassment should come if you if you choose not to to reach out to the people that want to help you because there are people who I don't want to call it that we love you, but it's real close. We really love being able to help people that are in a crisis like this and help them to move through it quickly in a way that's not going to be harmful to them or further harm to the people that are impacted by the situation. And Lori's one of the best. We have great resources here in our union. Um, and frankly, we get called on now frequently from other parts of the country because the systems that we've developed with each other, the trusts that we've developed with each other, the framework that we work in has become so sort of ingrained in the way we do it that it makes a big difference. And I encourage you to take advantage of that. Thanks for the invitation to Delia Laurie. I appreciate it. And I'll be glad to come back again and share more on another occasion.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Thank you, Ray, so very much. And just as we're ending, um we just want to invite you to our next webinar that we have coming up in a month. We are going to be tackling the topic of trauma and trauma-informed communication. It is on June 25th, as you can see, scrolling down at the end. So, again, thank you so very much for your time today, and we appreciate all that you have done. Um, and please let us know how we can help. Thank you and have a wonderful lunch. Bye bye.