Jeanne DamasioCroatiaAug 27, 2026, 5:22 PM
Danijela Kovačević sat down with her husband’s YouTube inbox and found more messages than the two of them could answer on their own. Viewers in eight countries asked Dario Kovačević, the Croatian pastor behind the channel BIBLIJA na dlanu [Bible in Hand], where they could study the Bible and where they could be baptized.
Kovačević directs Hope Channel Croatia, and his inbox is a small, legible picture of what media evangelism can do. A pastor recording in Croatian, for Croatians, is read in Slovenia, Austria, Serbia, North Macedonia, Germany, Montenegro, Switzerland, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, according to Kovačević. The people writing to him live in places where answers are not available in their own language.
"Dario and his team have been working strategically to reach people's heart needs," said Ramiro Quero, director of network strategies at Hope Channel International. "They are an example of what it means to use 'Christ's method alone' in the digital world."
“We can reach all the people, the whole world, in a short time,” Kovačević said. “It is possible, and it is possible only through media.”
He had no manual when he started. He chose Bible topics, recorded them, and watched what connected and what did not. Growth was slow for four years, he said, and the channel reached about 4,000 subscribers in that time. Then he began to study the platform the way a craftsman studies his tools, and the work changed. Within about a year it passed 22,000, and it now stands at about 23,800, with individual videos reaching as many as 105,000 views, Kovačević notes.
The lessons he drew from this growth became a book, Secrets of YouTube, published by Stanborough Press. Across 14 chapters he sets out what he would have liked to know at the start, beginning with the three things that decide whether a video is found on the platform: the topic, title, and thumbnail.
What the growth carries matters more to him than size, though. People have driven more than two hours to meet him after watching, and others have crossed the border from Slovenia and been baptized. Danijela began sorting the requests by region so each person could be handed to a congregation near them. Some wrote from towns where there is no Adventist church at all.
Closer to home, the church Kovačević pastors has grown from about 15 regular attendees to about 40, reaching 60 on some weeks, and the midweek prayer meeting from four people to 20, he said. Many of them arrived first through something they found online.
This is the part he most wants other creators to hear. He is convinced that attention to the audience is what decides the result. “You don’t have to be rich or big,” Kovačević said. “God can use you to reach a lot.” A simple camera and a clear understanding of the people watching are enough to begin, he says. He urges creators to learn their audience up close, their daily lives, the questions they carry, and the kind of content they respond to.
Hope Channel built the same instinct into a planning tool it introduced in July, called Mission Intelligence and now part of its licensing process. It guides each channel to define its audience and build a viewer persona, so that programming answers the questions people in that region actually ask.
Kovačević is already looking past what the channel has done. He talks about Dubrovnik, a walled city on the Adriatic coast that draws visitors from around the world and has no Adventist congregation, where viewers have already written to ask where they can worship. He sees the same pattern in country after country, someone searching, and no one yet answering in their language. “Who is preaching in Croatian, if not me?” he asked. For Kovačević, the harvest Jesus described in Matthew 9:37-38 (NIV) is close at hand, and it looks like a list of names in an inbox.
Credit for all photos: Courtesy of Dario Kovačević.
