| WORLD REPORT

Spring Meeting 2007

 

 

By Sandra Blackmer, Adventist World news editor

 

Almost 100 General Conference Executive Committee   members from the Adventist Church’s 13 divisions converged on the church’s world headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, April 10 and 11, to assess mission, vote policies, and discuss other matters of church business.

 

THE PRESIDENT: Jan Paulsen, president of the 
Adventist World Church, says having in our hearts 
a love for people will help retain members.
Spring Meeting 2007 took off on a high spiritual note, beginning with a two-hour presentation on the world church’s evangelistic initiative Tell the World, whose primary mission is to provide a way for every person in the world to hear the gospel message within the next five years. GC vice presidents Michael L. Ryan, Lowell C. Cooper, and Mark A. Finley led the multimedia event.

 

Describing the Adventist Church as being “not a bureaucratic institution involved in administrative trivia but [an organization] focused on mission—its evangelistic mission,” Finley reminded attendees of the church’s continual growth since its beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

 

About 3,500 members worshipped in a few dozen churches in North America in 1863, and today the Adventist Church comprises more than 14 million church members worldwide, Finley reported. He also presented world ratios ranging from one Adventist to every 373,143 people in the world in 1863, to one for every 1,268 in 1980, to one for every 430 in 2006.

 

Finley added that it took the church 107 years, from 1848-1955, to grow to 1 million members; 14.7 years, 1955-1970, to reach the 2 million mark; and 3.3 years, 1983-1986, to hit 5 million. Since 1986, the church has grown by a million members every 12 to 18 months, he said.

 

“Tell the World is making an impact today of huge proportions for Christ and the kingdom of God,” Finley said.

 

 

Leaders from several of the church’s world divisions gave reports and multimedia presentations depicting Tell the World initiatives in their regions.

 

Euro-Asia Division president Artur A. Stele reported that almost 12,000 satellite sites received the satellite downlinks from Kiev during a recent evangelistic series, resulting in 3,068 people baptized. He added that a new church Internet site had some 4 million hits in just two months.

 

Paul S. Ratsara, president of Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division (SID), said his division is targeting Johannesburg, South Africa—with a population of about

3.2 million—for evangelism. The church leaders’ focus is training lay members to become soul winners. “The people are on fire for God,” Ratsara said.

 

Following Ratsara’s presentation, Finley added that in one SID pastoral district, 273 members scattered in a few small churches were empowered for evangelism through prayer and training. They began holding evangelistic meetings, and 3,000 people were baptized by the end of the first series. Two and a half years later, the district membership has grown to 21,000.

 

In the Trans-European Division, which comprises regions as diverse as Iceland, Egypt, Denmark, Iraq, and the United Kingdom, president Bertil A. Wiklander shared the division’s goals of planting 350 new churches, developing 1,500 small groups, and conducting 3,000 public evangelistic meetings, with one of every 10 conducted by youth.

 

“Public evangelism can still work in Europe,” Wiklander said, “but it is not the only method we use.” He then described “innovative community outreach” organized mainly by youth and young adults using small-group evangelism and church-planting initiatives.

 

Wiklander added that 120 people in war-torn Darfur in western Sudan were recently baptized.

 

 

GC department directors reported on new world initiatives and advancements in technology.

 

WORLD INITIATIVES: Heather-Dawn Small,
director of GC Women’s Ministries, told 
attendees that “we need to touch people 
in their area of greatest need.”

Benjamin D. Schoun, president of Adventist World Radio (AWR) and coordinator of the Tell the World initiative for media, informed Executive Committee members that AWR is adding new languages to its programs in Africa and Asia. The broadcasting organization has also presented the AWR Signal Award to North West and North East Nigeria conferences in recognition of their progressive outreach to Muslims living in their regions, using AWR as the primary outreach tool.

 

The GC Communication Department now has a podcast of news that averages 350 hits a day, Schoun said. And Adventist News Network has about 6,000 regular subscribers and an additional 7,000 hits a day from nonsubscribers.

 

The worldwide publishing work is alive and well. Schoun noted that literature evangelists have sold more than 12 million copies of books and magazines, and church members have distributed 14 million missionary books and given away free 5 million copies of church magazines during the past year.

 

The Southern Africa-Indian Ocean and the Euro-Africa divisions have opened two new media centers in their regions to assist in the Hope Channel television outreach. Hope Channel is opening a new channel for Romanian broadcasts, and also is working toward opening another channel for China by August 2007.

 

“This is a major development,” Schoun said.

 

GC Women’s Ministries director Heather-Dawn Small affirmed that women worldwide are committed to improving the quality of life for women and sharing the love of Jesus by focusing on issues such as literacy, abuse, poverty, and women’s workloads.

 

“Women’s Ministries believes we need to touch people in their area of greatest need,” Small said.

 

 

Closing the Back Door

Executive Committee members on Tuesday of the session voted to adopt an appeal from the GC Council on Evangelism and Witness to church leaders and members to curb membership loss.

 

Presented by GC vice presidents Lowell C. Cooper and Mark A. Finley, the Council’s two-and-a-half-page statement indicated that although more than 5 million people were baptized into the Adventist Church from 2000 to 2005, nearly 1.4 million members walked out the back door and left the church.

 

During the last quinquennium some divisions began a review of active membership, Cooper said, resulting in higher-than-usual membership loss ratios.

“Current indications are that annual membership losses for reasons other than death equal approximately 28 percent of membership accessions,” and this “is not limited to new members,” the statement read.

 

The document cited research suggesting social and relational factors play a much larger role in a person’s dissatisfaction with the church rather than disagreement with church doctrine.

 

The statement suggests new members will most likely remain in the church if they are able to articulate their beliefs, form friendships within the congregation, and engage in ministry. To accomplish this, local church boards should, among other things, review membership care strategies, study membership accession and loss patterns, repeat Bible instruction, develop friendships and small groups with new members, and encourage new members to become involved in church outreach and other activities.

 

Executive Committee members who spoke to this issue were unanimous in their support of the appeal; however, some questioned how greater attention to member retention can be made part of the culture at the local church level. Suggestions by some participants included establishing an accountability process for local leaders, board members aggressively focusing on designing a discipling-oriented church, and cultivating a spirit of true love and concern for others.

 

“We have to have in our heart a love for people,” Paulsen said. “More than anything else … this will help us to retain our members.”

 

 

“I never cease to marvel that God, with all the angels at His command, has chosen us, sinful human beings, to tell the world of His love for us and of the plan of redemption,” GC treasurer Robert E. Lemon said in his opening remarks of the treasury report.

 

Lemon then announced worldwide tithe was up 10 percent in 2006, and NAD tithe up by 3 percent, compared to the previous year. This was in spite of only 52 Sabbaths last year compared to 53 in 2005. The 2006 total tithe came in at more than US$1.6 billion; total tithe in 2005 was almost $1.5 billion.

 

The amount designated for the GC World Budget in 2006 was $83.7 million, up 5.7 percent from 2005, Lemon said.

 

 

Mission Giving—A Shift in Trend

Mission offerings are also on the increase, a turnaround from the declining mission giving during the past half century, Lemon noted.

 

“Local offerings from divisions other than North America increased from 23 percent of tithe in 1950 to 36 percent in 2005,” Lemon said. “Mission offerings during that same period, however, declined from 36 percent of tithe to less than 4 percent.”

 

Lemon reported that the years 2002 to 2006 showed a world mission giving increase of 33 percent—from $24.1 million to $32.3 million—in divisions other than North America. In the North American Division (NAD), the increase in 2005 was more than 4 percent, and about 6 percent in 2006, twice the percentage increase in tithe.

 

“A shift in trend is clear,” Lemon said.

 

Lemon then emphasized a need to direct a larger portion of the World Budget—currently less than 7 percent of total tithes and offerings—toward entering regions of the world where there are few Adventists, especially the 10/40 window territories.

 

 

The Executive Committee elected three people recommended by the Nominating Committee to serve in GC positions:

 

 

NEW DIRECTOR OF GC AUDITING SERVICES: 
Paul H. Douglas
World church president Jan Paulsen also announced that Lisa Beardsley, associate director of the GC Education Department, was appointed chief editor of Dialogue, a magazine for Adventist students studying at secular schools.

 

 

Annual Council 2007, originally scheduled to be held this fall in Kiev, Ukraine, is changing locations to the World Church headquarters. Citing “insurmountable logistical challenges” as the reason for the change, Paulsen announced the plan is to convene Annual Council 2008 outside of North America. He added that the new venue is yet to be determined, but the city of choice “will probably be somewhere in Asia.”

 

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