The Adventist Development and Relief Agency has deployed an emergency response team as Typhoon Koppu drenches the northern Philippines, killing at least two people and leaving scores of people homeless. Typhoon Koppu made landfall on the main island of Luzon as a category 5 storm with winds approaching 125 miles per hour (200 kilometers per hour) early Sunday, leaving many areas without power.
A new facility to enhance the educational development of residents living in the Frederiksted community in St. Croix received recognition from the Virgin Islands government last month. Government officials applauded the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church in St. Croix for establishing a new equipped site to host a General Education Development (GED) program free of charge to the community.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church will hold an unprecedented three-day summit on Adventist education next year as it grapples with challenges such as low enrollment and high costs at some schools and seeks to ensure that all embrace the unique approaches of the church’s original educational model. “This will be an extremely important meeting,” church president Ted N.C. Wilson said in announcing the summit at the Annual Council business meetings this week.
When Judith Miranda and her husband visited Malibu, California over 10 years ago, there weren’t any Seventh-day Adventist churches in city limits. Miranda, a full-time registered nurse, decided not to sit still. She and other believers went from mansion to mansion in this wealthy community, praying with residents.
General Conference and division leaders re-affirmed the important role of women in the life of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and appealed to all church entities to respect a recent General Conference Session decision on ordination in order to avoid fracturing the world church. G.T. Ng, executive secretary of the Adventist world church, read the six-paragraph document aloud to church leaders and laypeople attending the Annual Council on Sunday, the first day of the weeklong council’s core business sessions
Annual Council delegates chose a group of General Conference department staff, filling positions that come up for appointment every five years after a General Conference Session and a few elections that were deferred from the GC Session last July. The nominating committee started two days of meetings at noon Sunday and returned to deliver its report to delegates about three hours later.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church raised $4 million for youth evangelism and saved nearly $3 million at the General Conference Session in San Antonio, but an economic storm fueled by restive global markets may cost the church millions of dollars. Juan R. Prestol-Puesán, the recently elected treasurer of the Adventist world church, said it was unclear whether sufficient tithe, offerings, and other income would be collected to meet the church’s 2015 budget and, looking forward to the future, urged church leaders and laypeople attending this week’s Annual Council business meetings to place their trust in God.
Ted N.C. Wilson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist world church, challenged every one of the church’s 18.5 million members to win souls for heaven by following the example of the sower in a parable by Jesus. Wilson, speaking in a Sabbath sermon that serves as his annual world pastoral address, used his 71-minute message to emphasize a new initiative called Total Member Involvement as a top priority of the church.
The Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary has approved a document on homosexuality that it hopes will “clearly set forth what Scripture teaches concerning homosexual practices and offer guidelines on how to interact with persons of same-sex orientation.” The 21-page document, titled “An Understanding of the Biblical View on Homosexual Practice and Pastoral Care,” was approved in a unanimous vote Friday after six months of preparation.
In 1960, around 54 percent of all Seventh-day Adventists lived in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, church membership in the so-called Global South has reached 16.9 million, or 92 percent of the world church membership.
A powerful hurricane badly damaged or destroyed at least six Seventh-day Adventist churches in The Bahamas, local church leaders said as they struggled to assess the destruction and account for church members a week after the Caribbean disaster. Hurricane Joaquin flooded buildings and ripped off roofs amid two days of fierce winds of up to 140 miles an hour (225 kilometers per hour) on Oct. 1 and 2.
More than 6,000 children in south central Mexico received backpacks full of school supplies days before the new school year began, thanks to the local Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) and thousands of Seventh-day Adventist church members in the region. The initiative, coordinated by ADRA’s office in the Inter-Oceanic Mexican union, involved thousands of church members contributing funds on Sabbaths in May to ensure that needy children would have the basic supplies to begin their school year.