Thousands of Seventh-day Adventists flooded cities and communities across Venezuela with a touch of kindness, a helping hand and a message of hope during a week-long outreach program held Aug. 7-13, 2016. The program coined as “Close to You Venezuela—Smile, God Believes in You,” has become the church’s most comprehensive social program, benefiting more than 771,000 people in 50 cities in a single week.
Thomas Beihl didn’t get the desired response when he went door to door at the men’s residence hall at Southern Adventist University, asking fellow students whether they had conducted Bible studies. About 150 students had signed up to conduct Bible studies during a 2006 evangelistic series in the U.S. state of Tennessee. Beihl, a freshman at the time, had agreed to track their progress on an Excel spreadsheet.
The leader of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nepal has called for prayers amid a state clampdown on evangelistic outreach, including the distribution of religious literature and even having a Bible in a Christian orphanage. All evangelistic activity is prohibited under a new Nepalese Constitution that came into force in September 2015.
The young, the old and the middle aged came out in their numbers to get physically active when the Northern Caribbean University (NCU) Media Group took to the streets with the third staging of NCU FM’s 14 in 14 Education and Wellness Challenge - an all island road show, which covered 14 outside broadcasts in 14 parishes in seven days, last month.
Seventh-day Adventist business owners and professionals from across Inter-America will meet for this year’s Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries (ASi) Convention in Medellin, Colombia, August 17-20, 2016. The 15th annual event themed “Connected, Empowered, and Transformed,” promises to inspire ASi chapter members and attendees to reaffirm their commitment of sharing Christ in their businesses and invite other professionals to join in support of the mission of the church.
While Jamaicans celebrated 54th years as an independent nation on Aug. 6, 2016, the spotlight was turned on the Christian community to examine its ways and “stop the finger pointing.” The call came from Seventh-day Adventist Church President in Jamaica, Pastor Everett Brown, as he addressed government leaders and congregants during the church’s Day of Prayer for the Nation, celebrated on the first Sabbath of August each year.
In a first, a Seventh-day Adventist believer has received the “Nobel Prize for Blindness” for coding Braille in ancient biblical languages that allow blind students to study the original texts on their own. Ray McAllister, a blind adjunct teacher at Andrews University and a licensed massage therapist, and his organization, the Semitic Scholars, were awarded the prestigious Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award by the National Federation of the Blind in July.
The other day, inventor Andrew DePaula sat down on an airplane beside a man in his late teens or early 20s. The young man seemed more interested in staring out the plane window than talking — until DePaula pulled out a business card-sized piece of paper. DePaula showed his seatmate that the ordinary-looking piece of paper could be folded into the world’s first and only paper USB drive.
Nearly all Seventh-day Adventist world division presidents attended ASI’s annual convention for the first time as church leadership stepped up efforts to encourage every church member to actively share the gospel as part of its Total Member Involvement program. Twelve of the 13 division presidents and Rick McEdward, president of the Adventist Church in the Middle East and North Africa, flew to the U.S. state of Arizona to participate in the annual gathering of lay people: business owners, individual professionals, and supporting ministries.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s official membership passed 19.5 million members in the first half of 2016, powered in part by a record 100,000 baptisms in Rwanda. “Praise the Lord! There are now more than 19.5 million Adventists worldwide!” the Adventist Church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research said in announcing the new figure on Twitter.
Dozens of Seventh-day Adventist youth flooded the city and communities in Oaxaca, Mexico with a message of peace, hope and good will during recent weeks. Most traveled from surrounding states in Mexico’s Inter-Oceanic region to be part of a two-to-four-week evangelism movement modeled after the world church’s One Year in Mission initiative established in recent years.
An overflow crowd of young Seventh-day Adventist entrepreneurs listened captivated Wednesday as a serial entrepreneur who fled Iraq as a child and a Sabbath-keeping clothing boutique owner shared their secrets for success at a first-ever conference of young Adventist entrepreneurs. About 120 people attended the opening day of the two-day Fruition Lab conference on the sidelines of the annual ASI convention in Phoenix, Arizona.