In 1969 the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists set up a committee to study something the denomination had never attempted: a worldwide shortwave broadcasting service that could reach believers and potential converts behind borders an ordinary missionary could not cross. H. M. S. Richards Sr., the founder of the church's older Voice of Prophecy radio program, was among those who had pushed for the idea. Two years of planning produced a working broadcast rather than only a proposal.
On October 1, 1971, Adventist World Radio went on the air for the first time, leasing a 250 kilowatt Marconi transmitter from Radio Trans Europe in Sines, Portugal, and aiming its signal at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, territory largely closed to open religious broadcasting at the time. The first programs went out in ten languages, twelve hours a week, a modest schedule built for audiences the Adventist Church could reach no other way. By January 1975 that had grown to twenty languages, and the network went on to build its own dedicated shortwave transmitting station on the Pacific island of Guam, extending its reach across Asia.
Adventist World Radio's growth since has tracked the collapse of exactly the kind of closed borders it was built to cross. It now broadcasts in more than one hundred languages through a combination of shortwave transmitters, podcasts and a partner network of more than 1,700 AM and FM stations worldwide, still administered by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists as its primary vehicle for international broadcasting, more than half a century after that first rented transmitter in Portugal went on the air.