Delegates overwhelming elected incumbent General Conference president Ted N.C. Wilson to another five years in office on Friday. An estimated 90 percent of some 2,358 registered delegates voted in favor of continuing Wilson in his position as leader of the Seventh-day Adventist world church after a 37-minute discussion at the General Conference session in San Antonio, Texas.
Moving to streamline the church’s work at a time of rapid growth, delegates opened the General Conference session on Thursday by officially approving the addition of an unprecedented 35 new union conferences to the Adventist world church. The delegates easily approved the administrative units—most of which are located in Africa, Central America, and South America—by holding up yellow cards in a vote in the cavernous Alamodome stadium in San Antonio, Texas.
Cab drivers hunting for customers outside the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport initially anticipated a boon in business when dozens of people suddenly burst through the exit doors and out into Texas’ hot, humid weather. But discouragement washed over some of their faces a moment later when they saw that the throng of Seventh-day Adventist pastors and their families made a beeline past the line of taxicabs to form a line by the bus stop.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage raises a lot questions for the church. This decision, reached on on June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, is one that many Seventh-day Adventist members greeted with apprehension.
General Conference Session is the largest business meeting of the Seventh-day Adventist Church that takes place every five years. During the 10-day meeting Church leaders are elected and business is conducted that governs the way the church will fulfill its mission. When it comes to facilitating official church business, more than 2,000 delegates are tasked with the responsibility of voting on recommendations from previous meetings of the Executive Committee, the Church’s second-highest governing body.
A worried Seventh-day Adventist family has asked for prayers for a 44-year-old disabled relative who went missing in remote mountains in the U.S. state of Arizona. A three-day search and rescue operation has been suspended as police regroup to consider their next move in the case of Janet Castrejon, who disappeared while on a weekend camping trip with her parents in Rustler Park in the Chiricahua Mountains on June 19.
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.
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 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.
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.
The world headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is abuzz with preparations for the upcoming General Conference Session. The 60th meeting of its kind in the 152-year history of the denomination will take place in San Antonio, Texas and will see as many as 60,000 people from more than 170 countries gather in the Alamodome.