Thousands of people have joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church across East Africa, including 2,309 in a mass baptism in the Indian Ocean following three weeks of evangelistic meetings. The baptisms, held on Saturday, February 7, capped the evangelistic meetings at scores of sites, including about 100 in Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam.
Seventh-day Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson has encouraged Adventists to be ambassadors of reconciliation and peace in South Sudan, where a yearlong conflict has caused 2 million people to flee their homes and prompted the establishment of a major ADRA program. Wilson spoke during a two-day visit to the world’s youngest country, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011. He is on a seven-country tour that started in India and Tanzania and will move to Rwanda on Tuesday.
The Curacao Religious Liberty Foundation (CRLF), initiated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, recently hosted a religious freedom festival on the island. The CRLF, an organization started by the Seventh-day Adventist Church to promote religious freedom among the various religious groups in Curacao and Bonaire, is very much like a chapter of the International Religious Liberty Association, said Pastor Shurman Kook, public affairs and religious liberty director for the church in Curacao and Bonaire. “The only difference is the legal form of the entity," he said.
A Seventh-day Adventist university in Thailand recently hosted a group of volunteer ophthalmologists who offered free eye care for more than 250 nearby elderly residents in need. The Church’s Asia-Pacific International University in the Saraburi province hosted the Mobile Eye Surgery Eye Clinic, sponsored by the province’s Red Cross Society February 2 to 6.
Top Seventh-day Adventist leaders from the Inter-American Division (IAD) held a special program Friday night to launch the church’s territory-wide week of prayer focused on pastoral families. During the program, pastoral couples prayed and encouraged pastors and their families to take time to care and strengthen their families spiritually, mentally and physically. The event, held at the IAD headquarter office in Miami, Florida, was carried live on the internet.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Inter-America will feature a special online program on Feb. 6 aimed at strengthening the more than 3,400 pastoral families across the territory at the start of the church’s pastoral family week of prayer. The one-hour program will seek to encourage pastors and their families to pause and seek God together during the year, organizers said.
The Adventist Development and Relief Agency in Sierra Leone is helping to operate a home decontamination program to prevent the spread of Ebola, an initiative that agency officials say is the only one of its kind in the country. Decontamination teams are spraying homes and replacing infected mattresses and bedding in neighborhoods on the outskirts of Freetown, the West African nation’s capital.
India’s Spicer Adventist University stayed true to its mission during five days of 100th-anniversary celebrations, setting aside a day to train 500 pastors and gathering community leaders for a meeting where Adventist Church president Ted N.C. Wilson underscored the importance of showing compassion toward those in need. The university, founded by U.S. missionary Gentry G. Lowry in 1905 with a mission to equip Bible workers and literature evangelists, used the festivities to reflect on its humble origins and to praise God for its growth into a powerful force for sharing Jesus in the Adventist Church’s Southern Asia Division and beyond.
Delegates to the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s General Conference Session in July won’t hold up yellow cards to vote as they have in past Sessions. Instead, for the first time, Session delegates will vote by pressing a button on an electronic voting device. Votes will be tallied instantly, and final results will be displayed in a bar chart on a screen.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has opened a Jamaican chapter of its International Religious Liberty Association, which defends the rights of all faiths, at a festival attended by senior government officials and thousands of other people in Kingston. Leaders of the chapter, called the National Religious Liberty Association, said the group was needed because Jamaicans should not take their current religious freedom for granted.
A Seventh-day Adventist Church in New York hosted a service of hope and healing in an effort to quell tensions brought on by weeks of unrest between police and civil rights groups stemming from the deaths of a citizen and two police officers. Tying in with celebrations to commemorate the legacy of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., the Hope and Healing for Better Police and Community Relations program featured Church leaders, city leaders, police officials and congressional representatives.
Seventh-day Adventists participating in this year’s Global Adventist Internet Network will meet in a new location—online. The annual conference in which participants examine emerging trends of ministry and technology will be held February 11 to 15 at gain.adventist.org. Each presentation, followed by live discussions, will be broadcast three times a day in order to accommodate participants in time zones worldwide.