The plight of those imprisoned for their faith should be higher on the agenda of international watchdog agencies and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, says world church United Nations liaison, Ganoune Diop, PhD. Diop made his comments on return from Geneva, Switzerland, where he represented the church at the United Nations Human Rights Council, which began a three-week session June 15 at the Palais des Nations.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Puerto Rico organized its first online youth evangelism campaign in an effort to reach thousands of young people on the island and encourage them to cling to Jesus and share His love with others. The five-day online campaign gathered more than 500 young people at the Bella Vista Adventist Church in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, June 2-6, 2015. More than 2,500 also watched the event live on the internet each night, organizers said.
Top Seventh-day Adventist leaders, staff members and their families at the Inter-American Division (IAD) headquarter office set aside a week of spiritual reflection as the church’s five-year period draws to a close this summer. The week of spiritual emphasis brought more than 80 church employees and their families to praise and worship together during the annual event held in Miami, Florida, from June 13-18, 2015.
Some 335 families in El Salvador have the opportunity to support themselves thanks to new skills and specialized tools provided by a partnership between the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Advent Stiftung Foundation—a Swiss-owned, non-government organization. Under its “Viva Mejor” or “Live Better” initiative, the church and Advent Stiftung celebrated the culmination of small business training and the handing over of tools to hundreds of families during a special ceremony held at the Don Bosco University gymnasium in San Salvador, on June 7, 2015.
At 55 with four young mouths to feed, Fermin Diaz Gutierrez would find himself day in and day out rummaging through the trash of the well-to-do families in the eastern city of Chiquimula in Guatemala. He was desperate to bring food to his four children and wife, Ana. Unemployed with no means of supporting his family, Diaz felt hopeless until he came across the Seventh-day Adventist Church, met Jesus and was selected to receive the training and tools to support his family and improve his living conditions.
A group of Seventh-day Adventist teenagers took a large golden picture frame to a busy British street last Sabbath afternoon to challenge people to consider their greatest values as they posed for a photo. The young people from the Yeovil Adventist Church in Yeovil, a town of 45,000 people located 130 miles (210 kilometers) from London, asked passersby to define what they saw as most valuable about themselves and to write the answer on a whiteboard.
A triathlon series organized by the Sanitarium Health & Wellbeing Company, a Seventh-day Adventist Church-owned food giant, has set a new world record for the largest under-16s triathlon series, with events in New Zealand and Australia attracting a total of 40,500 participants. The 2015 series of the Sanitarium Weet-Bix Kids TRYathlon began in December 2014 in Manakau, New Zealand, and finished in May 2015 on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Southeast Mexico, recently inaugurated its first model church in Riviera del Carmen, in the state of Quintana Roo, thanks to the faithful donations of church members, and funds collected by the local conference, union and the Inter-American Division (IAD). El Pedregal Adventist Church became the first among many planned churches in Southeast Mexico to follow a standard model bearing the corporate logo of the church and that has a set look for the sanctuary section for small, medium and large churches, according to local church leaders.
Academic vice presidents, research directors and professors from Seventh-day Adventist universities in the Inter-American Division (IAD) met to discuss and promote a culture of research across its 14 universities during the first Researchers’ Congress held in the territory. The congress gathered more than two dozen administrators and educators at Antillean Adventist University in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, May 19-20, 2015.
The first official Seventh-day Adventist Church has been inaugurated in the small European country of Andorra after more than 40 years of efforts. The Adventist Church has had a presence for many years in Andorra, a country of 85,000 people living on 181 square miles (468 square kilometers) between Spain and France. But the church members never had their own registered church until now.
Governor of Colombia’s North Santander state Edgar Jesús Díaz, commended the work of the Seventh-day Adventist Church for its health impact across the city of Cúcuta during a two-day impact earlier last month. During the event, more than 20,000 books on health and hope were distributed, a health expo on the eight natural remedies was held, dozens of disabled individuals raced on their wheelchairs and dozens of fruits and grain sacs were distributed on May 9-10, 2015.
Thousands of people were baptized across Zimbabwe on Sabbath as one of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s biggest initiatives to share Jesus resulted in the unified efforts of many groups, including ADRA, ASI, Light Bearers, and scores of church members who gave Bible studies. Baptismal numbers were trickling into the Zimbabwe Union Conference’s headquarters on Sunday, but preliminary estimates indicated that church leaders had met their goal of baptizing 30,000 people during a two-week evangelistic meeting that ended Sabbath, May 30.