Instead of unwrapping gifts at his birthday party, Ulysses Hsu, 9, of Eastvale, California, United States, was taking donations forLoma Linda University Children’s Hospital(LLUCH), a Seventh-day Adventist healthcare institution in Loma Linda, California. At his ninth birthday party, Hsu told his friends that he wanted to help support “Vision 2020: The Campaign for a Whole Tomorrow,” and by doing so he raised over $1,600.
Five months after Hurricane Matthew devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula, the Seventh-day Adventist Church is still trying to cope with helping members restore their lives and rebuild dozens of churches. The hurricane caused mudslides, bridges and roads to collapse, destroyed homes and churches, and displaced thousands of people.
Eddie Tilihoi is a young associate pastor with a pleasant demeanor and an engaging smile. He lives with Camelia and their six-month-old daughter in Northeast Romania, within minutes from the Ukraine and Moldova borders. Serving a district with 256 members in five churches and four companies, Eddie is constantly on the move through the fields and patches of forest that separate the villages and small towns. It is a farmland that resembles Southern Canada and the United States Midwest, which welcomed immigrants from his country and countries in the region many generations ago.
A five-year-long legal battle for the right to keep the seventh-day Sabbath has ended in a landmark victory for Seventh-day Adventist students in Kenya. The country’s top appeals court ruled last week that the religious freedom provisions of Kenya’s constitution require that Adventist students be excused from classes and other school-related activities on Saturday. The decision overturns an earlier ruling that found no constitutional protection for Sabbath-keeping students.
The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (Haiti) in Haiti recently distributed water purification units and food kits to displaced families still affected by Hurricane Matthew, which hit the island nation last October. Hurricane Matthew moved into Haiti’s south peninsula on Oct. 3, and stayed for nearly 36 hours at winds of 136 miles an hour, causing mudslides, flooding and bridges and roads to collapse.
A leading Seventh-day Adventist religious freedom advocate was honored last month for his commitment to promoting religious liberty as a fundamental human right. Ganoune Diop, PhD, director of public affairs and religious liberty for the Adventist world church, received the 2017 Thomas L. Kane Religious Freedom Award on February 17 at the annual three-day conference of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
It took two weeks and over 1,000 kilometers on the road in Costa Rica for a production team to film the best natural spots and animal shelters for the second season of the Animal Encounters series—a nature documentary produced by ARtv. The production follows the successful series of Animal Encounters filmed in 2011. In that first series, felines, elephants, sharks, dolphins were featured. The series has been aired repeatedly on Hope Channel, Revelation TV in the U.K., Parables and Go Christian TV in the U.S., as well as Amazon Prime and ARtv.
In the small Caribbean Island of Tortola, four Seventh-day Adventist congregations came together last week to offer free car washes for single mothers in their communities. Church members from the East End, Belle Vue, Purcell and Maranatha Adventist Churches connected with the 25 mothers and their families by contacts in the community and through social media announcements. Church members were busy washing, cleaning and even preparing meals for what became an all-day event on Feb. 20, 2017.
Seventh-day Adventists-owned Andrews Memorial Hospital (AMH) in Kingston, Jamaica, was the Center of Excellence site where a patient was the first ever to benefit from a 4-level viscoelastic cervical disc replacement procedure. The surgery, which will usher in a revolutionary new treatment approach in spinal surgery globally, was performed by a team of doctors led by Harvard-trained and world-renown orthopedic spinal surgeon, Dr. Kingsley R Chin on Jan. 30, 2017, using an advanced technology known as the Freedom Cervical Disc.
Top Seventh-day Adventist leaders at the Inter-American Division (IAD) took time last weekend to honor the work of its thousands of church elders who assist pastors in ministering to the 3.7 million members across the vast territory. The live two-hour online program was also a time to launch a new certification program aimed at equipping church elders who nurture and disciple members every week across more than 21,000 churches and congregations in the IAD.
A major drive to engage every church member in Total Member Involvement has helped propel the Seventh-day Adventist Church past 20 million members for the first time in its history. The Adventist Church had 20,008,779 members as of Dec. 31, 2016, a net increase of 882,332 people, or 4.6 percent, from the previous year, the church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research said.
“Hacksaw Ridge,” a film that tells the story of Desmond T. Doss, the Seventh-day Adventist army medic who became the first conscientious objector to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, won two Oscars at the 89th Academy Awards on February 26.