Jamaican media houses don’t know what they are missing for allowing the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) to snatch up Nigel Coke right from under their very news noses.

Not that Coke had any ambitions of becoming a crack journalist. But it is his kind of dogged determination and Columbo-like persistence that usually separate the men from the boys among news reporters.

At the beginning of this year, Coke smashed Adventist tradition by becoming only the first person to leap from a local church directly to the position of communications director of the West Indies Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

It is not a position to be scoffed at. The SDA church is the largest denomination in Jamaica, with over 230,000 members in the region and growing fast. Coke also has portfolio responsibility for church communications in The Bahamas, Turks and Caicos Islands and the Cayman Islands which, with Jamaica, constitute the West Indies Union Conference.

News editors in Jamaican media houses are familiar with the name Nigel Coke and the voice that is always accompanied by a disarming laugh. More importantly, they know that once he sends them a press release, they can expect a follow-up call, or two or three or however many it takes. If they find it annoying at times, they know that he is doing his job well and that that is just how they would like their reporting staff to be.

“I enjoy the interaction with the news media and seeing the church activities publicised,” Coke admits in an interview with the Sunday Observer.

Which is why Coke is such a big catch to the SDA church. He represents, perhaps, the first in a new breed of Christian church communicators who are increasingly becoming aware of the endless possibilities of treating the news pages and airwaves as a modern pulpit that can reach considerably far more persons than the traditional church pews.

But it is not only journalism that has lost out for not recruiting him. Nigel Oswald Coke, 40, schooled at Wolmer’s Boys, Exed Community College and the Northern Caribbean University, gave up his job as investment manager at First Caribbean International Bank, taking a pay cut in the process, to become communications director.

That’s after 15 years in investment banking, starting as investment officer at Oliver Jones’ Island Life Merchant Bank in 1990, after he felt dissatisfied with his old job as sponsorship co-ordinator at the state-run Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC).

After Island Life he worked as an account executive at Barita Investments from 1993 to 1997 and then joined First Caribbean International Securities, formerly CIBC Trust and Merchant, as investment representative before he was promoted to manager.

Friends told him the move from his banking job to the church position was sheer madness. But Coke, a Kingstonian, says he took the job with his eyes wide open.

“It’s obviously a step of faith,” he says. “I have Abraham, who is regarded as the father of faith as a model. When God told him ‘Go to an unknown land’, he dropped everything and went, with no questions asked, not knowing whence he was going. At least, I know where I am going.”

He argues that it was a logical step, after his conversion to Christianity and subsequent baptism at the Meadowvale SDA Church in Havendale, St Andrew on October 23, 1996. Neither does he view it as mere coincidence that he was ordained as an elder in the church on October 23, 2004. “It’s how God speaks His will,” he believes.

He has since been greatly encouraged by the confidence shown in him by SDA president Dr Patrick Allen, to whom he reports as communications director. Allen himself set a personal example and has been followed by several others who gave up higher paying private sector jobs to serve the church, Treasurer Herman Ming being among the other notables.

Coke stumbled into the world of media and communication when he found himself being responsible for publicising the activities of the Meadowvale Church and editing its magazine, Meadowvale News Wave, under Pastor Adrian Cotterell, who is now president of the East Jamaica Conference.

On a trip to Miami, he went into the Adventist Book Centre and happened upon a book titled Getting the Church in the Press. He paid for it, read it and never looked back.

As communications director, Coke is the official spokesman for the SDA church and is in charge of the union’s media programmes which air on eight radio and television stations and its cable channel; editor of its quarterly magazine Visitor; oversees all communication directors for the eight conferences and missions within the union; updating its website and providing timely information on church activities to the Miami-based Inter-American Division and the Maryland-based General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

He also provides communication support for Adventists institutions and departments like the Northern Caribbean University, Andrews Memorial Hospital, the Book and Nutrition Centre, the Investment Management Limited, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) and the Adventist Lay Persons Services and Industries.

Coke, who regards himself as a serious family man, is married to the former Bobbette Graham, an administrative assistant at the NCB Card Centre. They have two sons, Chad Anthony, 7 and Ramoy, 6, both students at Kingsway Preparatory.