Silver Spring, Maryland …. [Wendi Rogers/ANN]
We are not doing that if we never give up some of our time. And worse yet, we are not giving God the opportunity to use us in incredible ways if we do not allow Him some of our time.”
Craig started her work through the Adventist Volunteer Center, which operates from the church’s world headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States. There are also branch volunteer offices around the world.
The demand for Seventh-day Adventist volunteers is never-ending, church leaders say. In its seventh year, the Adventist Volunteer Center is seeing a growing number of missionaries. Though volunteerism is alive, says Vern Parmenter, director of the center, there are never enough volunteers.
“At any one time there are literally hundreds of positions still available on the Web site [www.adventistvolunteers.org] that we haven’t filled, and every day it changes,” he says.
The problem is not that there aren’t a lot of willing people, Parmenter explains, but rather that more and more requests from the local regions are for people of certain qualifications. Some places, for example, require a volunteer to have a college degree, which means the volunteer center cannot send student missionaries to those regions.
“Our volunteers [the Adventist Volunteer Center] will plant churches, but that’s not their only focus. They may be computer operators, doctors, dentists, pastors, administrators, retired people, and young people, people of all ages. From our point of view, whatever a [church region] dreams of possibly doing we try to accommodate,” Parmenter says.
>From the office’s Web site, one can choose what country they want to go
to and list what type of missionary work they are looking for.
If a volunteer can’t find what they’re looking for, “don’t give up,” Parmenter suggests. “Keep looking, or write to your volunteer director in your church’s administrative region. What I’ve found very often is that many of our leaders around the world haven’t begun to dream what church members would like to do for the church. When we prod them and say, ‘Here’s somebody who has these qualifications,’ they say, ‘We’ve never thought of asking a volunteer for that. We never dreamed they’d be available.'”
Besides the volunteer center, the Adventist Church uses other methods of volunteering as well. Some go as Global Mission “pioneers,” who are “essentially young people from within their own home country staying there going to new unentered areas to plant churches,” Parmenter says.
One can also serve as a so-called inter-division employee, someone who travels from their local administrative church region to another. They are employed missionaries who mostly work in educational institutions with specialized skills, though some also work in administration or the medical field.
“This is a part of the changing face of mission,” Parmenter says. “In most of the developing countries we have colleges and universities and we have trained the local people to do the pastoral work. We don’t need to send church pastors if that’s their only role because we have church pastors in just about every country … who work among their own culture. They know what works best better than a missionary who goes in and takes ages to find out what works and what doesn’t work.”
Parmenter adds that in many countries, such at the 10/40 window, an area where nearly 70 percent of the world’s population lives, and where the majority have yet to hear the Gospel message, there is a need for pastors and evangelists.
A new program being developed by the Adventist Volunteer Center is the “His Hands” project. “The primary premise of the program is that we’re going to encourage every church in the world to sponsor and send at least one missionary per year somewhere,” Parmenter explains. Expenses will be covered by the sending organization, but they may receive a missionary as well.
“We’re not necessarily saying a church has to send a missionary overseas,” Parmenter says. “They could go somewhere in their own country.”
The program will be presented at the church’s world session in 2005 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
