31 Mar 2009, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States…Mark A. Kellner, News Editor, Adventist World/ANN 31 Mar 2009, Silver
According to Bill McClendon, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “Jesus never said, 'Go ye into all the world and hold church.'” Instead, McClendon says, God's mandate was to “Go, teach, baptize and teach some more.”
That method — what McClendon calls “non-stop evangelism” — seems to have worked for an Adventist fellowship in Tulsa, created eight years ago to replace a 90-year-old Adventist congregation. The church plant grew from 17 members in 2001 to its current weekly attendance of between 750 and 800. The fellowship has three “campuses” — two English-speaking and on worshipping in Spanish — and 550 people have become baptized members over the years.
“Tulsa is a very religious community, but there's also a very secular part of society,” McClendon said. “We are seeing a whole segment of society that has been raised without knowing about the Bible and Christianity.”
McClendon's report was one of several highlights for the 2009 Spring Meeting of the Council on Evangelism and Witness, a panel comprised of Seventh-day Adventist world church leadership and lay members.
The council's purpose is “not to come and vote a particular agenda, but [to] spend some time in exploration of ideas and a pattern of thoughts that might stimulate growth in the church,” said Lowell Cooper, a world church general vice president and CEW co-chair.
The March 29 full-day event included numerous reports on world church activities. Along with McClendon's call for continuous evangelism, Ganoune Diop, director of the church's Global Mission Religious Study Centers, outlined the relationship of Adventism to other world faith groups.
“Each world religion, at best, only presents a partial diagnosis of the human problem,” Diop said, while “Christianity and, specifically, Seventh-day Adventism, offers a solution to the problem. … The good news in its comprehensive and multifaceted expression is missing in [the] world's religions and philosophies.”
Other presentations highlighted the progress of “Follow the Bible.” The traveling Bible has already stopped at four of the church's 13 world regions. In many regions, replicas of the traveling Bible are being used at special events in order to continue promoting the Bible-reading effort in the months leading up to the 2010 world church session in Atlanta, Georgia.
In the church's Trans-European region, Norway and Sweden are charting growth, the latter country recording the first such membership growth in 20 years, regional president Bertil Wiklander reported.
In south Sudan, an Anglican priest joined the Adventist Church and is now sharing the message among his people. And in Beirut, a media center expects to begin production of Arabic-language programming in 2010.
Some 600,000 Adventist homes in the church's South American region are expected to participate in a territory-wide day of “friendship evangelism” on May 30 by inviting community members over for lunch and an introduction to the church's message. Visitors will be invited to follow-up Bible studies.
In the church's West-Central Africa region, nearly half of Babcock University students are now Adventist Church members, up significantly since a recent satellite evangelism campaign, regional president Gilber Wari said.
