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.
Hours after the official opening of the 60th General Conference Session today in San Antonio, Texas, nearly 400 delegates and top church leaders from throughout the Inter-American Division (IAD) territory met to choose 40 nominating committee members. The new committee members will represent the IAD when nominating the next president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church worldwide, which is scheduled to take place tomorrow.
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 Seventh-day Adventist traffic police officer recently won a court decision to keep his job and be exempt from working on Saturdays. Paul Rivera Nuñez, who has been working as a traffic police officer in the Cartago Province in Costa Rica since 2013, was notified by his superiors in April that he had to work on Saturdays.
In less than a week, thousands of Seventh-day Adventists from all over the world will convene in San Antonio, Texas for the 60th General Conference Session to participate in business meetings and have an opportunity to visit hundreds of exhibit booths showcasing Adventist organizations and their institutions. The Inter-American Division (IAD), with its vast territory of 24 major church region and various institutions, will get to highlight its vast multi-cultural, multi-language territory in its large exhibit display area during the 10-day session.
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.
More than 600 Seventh-day Adventists from across West Venezuela crowded the Metropolitan Adventist Institute in Barquisimeto to take part in the church’s first Adventist Communicators Congress held June 12-13, 2015. Challenged to be “Messengers of God”, hundreds of Adventist communicators from across 11 states, dozens of church leaders and members committed to communicating hope within their communities.
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.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Puerto Rico organized its first online youth evangelism campaign in an effort to reach thousands of young people on the island and encourage them to cling to Jesus and share His love with others. The five-day online campaign gathered more than 500 young people at the Bella Vista Adventist Church in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, June 2-6, 2015. More than 2,500 also watched the event live on the internet each night, organizers said.