News
Can Christians Have Tattoos? - By Loren Seibold | 10 December 2018 | Had someone 40 years ago assigned to me the part of futurist, near the top of the list of things I wouldn’t have predicted would be the widespread popularity of tattoos. In my youth, skin art was associated with roustabouts in dockside bars, not educated professionals in […]- Inquests Opened Into Circumstances of Deaths of Young Adventist and His Wife in Leicester, England - 9 December 2018 | Two separate inquests have been launched into the deaths of a young Adventist and his wife in Leicester, England. Jesus and Lorraine Sanchez were found dead in their home on November 27. Leicester Live reported that a family friend broke into their home to check on them after growing concerned that […]
- Check Out This Video to Help Us Celebrate 25 Years! - Adventist Today is a quarter century old and we thought we would celebrate with a video and a little bit of nostalgia about what life was like in the early 90s. Enjoy the video and please help us celebrate by giving to our year-end fundraiser!
- Jamaican Adventist Leader Speaks Out Against Extrajudicial Police Action - 6 December 2018 | Glen Samuels, president of the West Jamaica Conference of the Adventist Church, recently appealed to the Jamaica Constabulary Force to avoid extrajudicial actions toward suspects that are ultimately freed by courts. According to the Jamaica Observer, Samuels was speaking last month at the first-ever Annual Security Forces and Youth Mentorship Prayer […]
- 2018 Winter Fundraising Report–Friday, December 7 - Paul Richardson and Monte Sahlin introduce the 2018 Winter Fundraising drive in this video report.
- News Briefs for Friday, December 7 - News reports from Newbold College, Columbia Union Conference, Washington DC, Australia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; the Philippines, Jamaica and Berrien Springs, Michigan From Naomi Gritt, Adventist Today Campus Representative at Newbold College in Berkshire, England: Every week, the Newbold Homeless Action Group drives to London to help the homeless. As it is getting colder now, they […]
- Conference Bans Independent “Loyalty Oath” Event - 6 December 2018 | During a regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday (December 4) the Adventist denomination’s Upper Columbia Conference (UCC) executive committee voted to ban the activities of the group promoting what they call the World Church Affirmation Sabbath (WCAS). Following a thoughtful and open discussion of the distractions being created in UCC churches as […]
- General Conference Creates Adventist “Brand Promise” - From ANN – 5 December 2018 | “We can help you understand the Bible to find freedom, healing and hope in Jesus.” So reads the Adventist Promise, a statement which the General Conference of the Adventist Church created to set a clear expectation of what the worldwide public can expect from all Adventist entities and […]
- Feather River Clinic to Reopen Soon in Paradise While Hospital Recovery Will Take Longer - 4 December 2018 | Adventist Health has announced that the Feather River Health Center, a large clinic operated by Adventist Health Feather River, will likely reopen within the next few weeks. The clinic was a newer structure that did not suffer the damage from the Camp Fire experienced by many other of the hospital buildings. […]
- Nurse at Adventist Health Portland Faces Heroin Smuggling Charges - 3 December 2018 | A registered nurse at Adventist Health Portland has been charged with trafficking heroin from Vancouver to Portland. Katu2 reported that Rene Elene Griffin Nunn, 59, of Vancouver, was issued a one-count indictment in court on November 29. According to the indictment, Nunn allegedly intended to distribute controlled substances. She is accused […]
- Adventists in Alaska Face Earthquake with Faith - By Harry Banks, 3 December 2018 | On Friday (November 30), Adventists in Alaska were hit with an earthquake, along with the rest of the population. Many of them shared experiences on Sabbath at church. Bonnie Barnett was home alone at 8:29 AM when she heard a great roar like a train, and then the […]
- Joan Coggin, Co-founder of Loma Linda University Overseas Heart Surgery Team, Dies at 90 - From a Loma Linda University Health press release – 2 December 2018 | C. Joan Coggin, MD, the Loma Linda University Health cardiologist who in the 1960s cofounded the Loma Linda University Overseas Heart Surgery Team, which went on to perform more open-heart surgeries than any similar organization, died Nov. 29. She was 90. In […]
Commentary
- Junior’s Christmas and the True Meaning of Immanuel - Richard W. Coffen | 10 December 2018 | 11:45 a.m. Thursday, November 15—Long lines jutted from checkouts. I pulled in behind lane 9. Ahead stood a well-dressed, well-coifed lady. Well below the median age of 72.2[1] for us retirees in Green Valley! Ms. Anonymous placed a few items onto the conveyor belt—two boxed toys, Christmas […]
- How the Church Can Make You Worse Than You Were Before - by Eugene Gerasimov | 9 December 2018 | There is a widely quoted statement by Karl Marx that “Religion is the opiate of the people.” We who love our faith will disagree that religion has a narcotic effect. But you should know that religion can be very dangerous. Serious faith is risky, like having a […]
- Are Sunday Laws Coming? - by Reinder Bruinsma | 7 December 2018 | For a few weeks the supermarket close to the apartment building where we live is open on Sundays. Sunday shopping has long been a hotly debated issue in local politics. Until recently the influence of the religious parties was strong enough to frustrate the attempts by the […]
- Who Are Those Whom “God Will Bring With” Jesus? A Study of 1 Thessalonians 4:14 - Richard W. Coffen | 4 December 2018 | Paul’s claim that during the Second Advent “God will bring with him” those “which sleep in Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 4:14) has been the proverbial fly in our state-of-the-dead doctrinal ointment. If we take the text just as it reads, then dead Christians are presently in heaven but […]
- The No-Thing at the Center of Every-Thing. - by Jack Hoehn | 29 November 2018 | Jack’s wife Deanne’s family home, his sister-in-law’s homes, and the Adventist hospital, church community and school that the Dean Hoiland family helped found in Paradise, California, were destroyed or seriously damaged by the unprecedented town-destroying Camp Wildfire disaster. Alaska too has had everything now shaken. When everything […]
- The Creative Power of Forgiving - by Elle Berry | 29 November 2018 | I never thought of myself as an angry person. In my childhood, I veered so far toward the tender-hearted side of things, you might have thought I was auditioning for Mother Teresa. I was the kid who took in blind cats and rescued orphaned rabbits. It was […]
- Indian Layman Challenges Elder Wilson: When Traveling, Be a Servant Leader - by Alexander Samuel | 29 November 2018 | An Open Letter to Pastor Ted Wilson Dear Elder Wilson: I have heard that you will be going to India in June of 2019—not your first trip to India as a president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventist Church. About 30 years ago, I saw your […]
- Dare We Gentiles Exclude Women from Ministry? - by John Phiri | 26 November 2018 | Emile Durnkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, argued that “God is nothing more than a symbol representation of the collective energy and dominant values of the society that worships Him.” Any image of God, according to Durkheim is characterized by those traits which the society […]
- The Dangers of an Arrogant and Lazy Approach to Bible Prophecy - If Trump Is the Little Horn, Is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the King of the North? By Stephen Ferguson | 23 November 2018 | I was fascinated to read Adventist Today’s recent article, “A New Interpretation of the Little Horn of Daniel 7”. To recap: the article suggested, amongst other matters, “the little horn of Daniel […]
- To Mislead and Manipulate - by Lindsey Abston Painter | 22 November 2018 | Today on the internet I came across a video that was said to be “created by lay members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church” and “produced in partnership with the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.” It was about women’s ordination, unity, and the infamous compliance document voted […]
- More Peoples’ History of the Origin of Black Adventism - By Benjamin Baker | 19 November 2018 | I was pleased to see the article “Adventist History, Herstory, and Ourstory: Towards a People’s History of the Origin of Black Adventism” by my friends and brothers Sydney Freeman and Maury Jackson. I’d like to respond here to their call for a reassessment and reconceptualization of black […]
- OV’s Last Visit: His Final Take on Jesus and Christianity - by Erv Taylor | 16 November 2018 Author’s Note: Readers may recall that OV (“Our Visitor”) is from a planet circling the nearest star to Earth, other than our sun. We call his star Proxima Centauri. It is about four light years away. That means that traveling at the speed of light (which obviously is […]
Features
- The Day They Ruined My Picture of Jesus - By Kris Coffin Stevenson | 7 December 2018 | It was the children’s fault that my picture of God was ruined. If they hadn’t gotten their smeary fingers on it, it might have stayed exactly the way I envisioned it. And that would have been worse. All of this paradigm-shifting happened when I attended a […]
- An Interview with Dan Wysong - Dan Wysong was pastor of the Chico, California, Seventh-day Adventist Church, a 750-member congregation in the denomination’s Northern California Conference. Chico is a city of 93,000 about 100 miles north of Sacramento. There has been considerable controversy around this congregation’s accepting an LGBTQ person for baptism into church membership. Among the outcomes is that Wysong […]
- Desmond Ford’s Historic Glacier View Document, Republished - By John Rosier | 29 November 2018 | Recently one of the most famous documents in the twentieth-century history of the Adventist faith was republished in a new edition with some recent annotation and documentation. “Daniel 8:14, the Day of Atonement and the Investigative Judgment” was written by Dr. Desmond Ford, then a visiting professor […]
- Seventh-day Adventists in Conflict - by Ronald Lawson, Ph.D. | 27 November 2018 | During the first half of the 1980s, conflict within Seventh-day Adventism received a great deal of attention in the press. The titles of some of the articles included “The Shaking Up of Adventism?” [Christianity Today, 1980a]; “Theologian Told to Defend His Views” [Los Angeles Times, 1980a]; […]
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- Urgent Apocalypticism in Adventism - by Ronald Lawson, Ph.D | 22 November 2018 | October 22 this year was the 174th anniversary of what Adventists know as “The Great Disappointment.” It also means that Adventists have been proclaiming urgently that Jesus is returning “soon” for 174 years. After that many years, what does “soon” mean? How soon is “soon”? If the […]
- A Thanksgiving Reading - by William Law | 22 November 2018 | There is no state of mind so holy, so excellent, and so truly perfect as that of thankfulness to God, and consequently nothing is of more importance in religion than that which exercises and improves this habit of mind. A dull uneasy complaining spirit, which is sometimes […]
- Adventist Apocalypticism - by Ronald Lawson, Ph.D. | 13 November 2018 | The paper just uploaded to my website, which you are invited to read, was, like the previous paper, originally written at the request of the editor of an encyclopedia. In this case it was an article simply titled “Seventh-day Adventism” that was published in the Encyclopedia […]
- Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism: Seventh-day Adventism - by Ronald Lawson, Ph.D. | 06 November 2018 | During the period from about 1995 through 2007, several American publishers prepared and published encyclopedias that focused on various aspects of religion. Libraries were an important portion of the market that they had in mind when they considered marketing these volumes. Editors were appointed who were […]
- Donors Initiate Legal Inquiry into the Hope Center Project - by Rita Corbett | 1 November 2018 | The story of Hope Center is a story of committed members who joined hands to build a conference center to promote the message of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Andhra Pradesh, South India. It now seems that in the larger frame of things that God alone knows, […]
- The Trial of Elder Hernandez, part 17 - Hailing from a country in one of two hemispheres, Sabine Dürer is a recent fifth-generation convert to Adventism. He or she may or may not have been Adventist-educated through college, or work for a major SDA institution, but perhaps not. Sabine enjoys spending time outdoors in his or her urban rural community, cooking sweet, salty, sour, […]
- An October 22 Prank and Object Lesson - by Ryan Becker | 22 October 2018 | In 2013, while working at Forest Lake Academy, Ben Kreiter and I had a wonderful idea to celebrate Great Disappointment Day. That morning, we told all the seniors there would be free pizza in the Campus Ministries office at lunch. They spread the news around, eventually growing […]
Poetry & Arts
- Somewhere: Spiritual Lessons from West Side Story - by S.M. Chen | 26 April 2018 | “There’s a place for us…” —from “Somewhere,” song in 1957 Broadway musical “West Side Story” One of the finer achievements of the late musician (conductor and composer) Leonard Bernstein was the music he composed for “West Side Story.” In collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, lyricist, he created for […]
- Revelation 2:17: A Poem - by Carolyn Shultz | 13 April 2018 | A smooth white stone. Mystery-white like Melville’ s whale? Alabaster— Or perhaps a new-made onyx Forged in the last prolific fires That purge and permute the once clean earth To Earth again. Inscribed, John says. Ur-Hebrew? Apocalyptic Greek? I think I’d fancy Strange new shapes and lines […]
- Lest We Forget - “Love is so short; forgetting is so long.” ~Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet (1904-1973), Nobel laureate (1971) in literature “… before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” ~Isaiah 65:24 I take a number of pills daily. These include a multivitamin formulation, chewable megavitamin C, vitamin D, L-lysine, and […]
- Something for the POTUS - by S.M. Chen | 23 February 2018 | I don’t know if Donald Trump reads USA TODAY. The back page of the first section of the 2/13/18 issue caught my attention. Someone named Tom Blair took out a full page ad entitled “Mr. President,” with the subheading: “In anticipation of Presidents’ Day (February 19) consider […]
- Ken Lauren: An Appreciation - by S.M. Chen | 12 February 2018 | Dr. Ken Lauren died not long ago of an injury sustained in Costa Rica, while he was working as a volunteer on the construction of a church. A report was posted here at Adventist Today. I visited Peru in 2005 at the invitation of my brother, taking […]
- Jesus’ Response to Nationalism & Racism - by Lars Justinen | 2 February 2018 | There was an immigration problem back in Jesus’ day. It seems the culture then was steeped in nationalism and racism. Especially hated in Israel were the “Muslims” of their day: the Samaritans. While sharing the same roots in Father Abraham, the Jews viewed the Samaritans as […]
- Doing Nothing Because You Can Do Only a Little? - by S.M. Chen | 22 January 2018 | “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” —Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Irish statesman and philosopher The story is told of an old man who walks the beach. He is in the habit of doing this before he begins […]
- Sunrise, Kapaa 1/11/18 - by S.M. Chen | 12 January 2018 | Some ancients bent a knee to sun. With outstretched arms they welcomed it And turned their face to catch its light And heat that warmed them to the bone, That took away the chill within. We, too, have shared the wonder of A rising sun in flaming […]
- More Rain - By S.M. Chen | 21 December 2017 | “The rain falls on the just And also on the unjust fella But mainly on the just Because the unjust steals the just’s umbrella.” —Heywood Broun, 20th century American journalist When, a few months ago, I wrote an essay, “Rain”, little could […]
- A Light to Lead Us Home - by Sharan Bennett | 20 December 2017 | Christmas, 2017 enters a chaotic and gloomy world that seems unprepared to receive it. But has our world every been much different? Ellen White says of the first Christmas: “The earth was dark through misapprehension of God.” (The Desire of Ages, p.22) And “While the light of […]
- On Learning from Bad Decisions - By S.M. Chen “There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.” – Abraham Lincoln “Every why hath a […]
- After 500 Years, God’s Grace is Still Amazing - by Sam Millen, 4 November 2017 October 31st has come and gone. No, I’m not referring to Halloween in America, but All Hallows’ Eve (All Saint’s Eve) in Germany 500 years earlier. On October 31st, 1517, the German monk and theology professor Martin Luther decided to nail his 95 Theses against Indulgences on the Bulletin Board […]
All
- Can Christians Have Tattoos? - By Loren Seibold | 10 December 2018 | Had someone 40 years ago assigned to me the part of futurist, near the top of the list of things I wouldn’t have predicted would be the widespread popularity of tattoos. In my youth, skin art was associated with roustabouts in dockside bars, not educated professionals in […]
- Junior’s Christmas and the True Meaning of Immanuel - Richard W. Coffen | 10 December 2018 | 11:45 a.m. Thursday, November 15—Long lines jutted from checkouts. I pulled in behind lane 9. Ahead stood a well-dressed, well-coifed lady. Well below the median age of 72.2[1] for us retirees in Green Valley! Ms. Anonymous placed a few items onto the conveyor belt—two boxed toys, Christmas […]
- Inquests Opened Into Circumstances of Deaths of Young Adventist and His Wife in Leicester, England - 9 December 2018 | Two separate inquests have been launched into the deaths of a young Adventist and his wife in Leicester, England. Jesus and Lorraine Sanchez were found dead in their home on November 27. Leicester Live reported that a family friend broke into their home to check on them after growing concerned that […]
- Check Out This Video to Help Us Celebrate 25 Years! - Adventist Today is a quarter century old and we thought we would celebrate with a video and a little bit of nostalgia about what life was like in the early 90s. Enjoy the video and please help us celebrate by giving to our year-end fundraiser!
- How the Church Can Make You Worse Than You Were Before - by Eugene Gerasimov | 9 December 2018 | There is a widely quoted statement by Karl Marx that “Religion is the opiate of the people.” We who love our faith will disagree that religion has a narcotic effect. But you should know that religion can be very dangerous. Serious faith is risky, like having a […]
- The Day They Ruined My Picture of Jesus - By Kris Coffin Stevenson | 7 December 2018 | It was the children’s fault that my picture of God was ruined. If they hadn’t gotten their smeary fingers on it, it might have stayed exactly the way I envisioned it. And that would have been worse. All of this paradigm-shifting happened when I attended a […]
- Jamaican Adventist Leader Speaks Out Against Extrajudicial Police Action - 6 December 2018 | Glen Samuels, president of the West Jamaica Conference of the Adventist Church, recently appealed to the Jamaica Constabulary Force to avoid extrajudicial actions toward suspects that are ultimately freed by courts. According to the Jamaica Observer, Samuels was speaking last month at the first-ever Annual Security Forces and Youth Mentorship Prayer […]
- 2018 Winter Fundraising Report–Friday, December 7 - Paul Richardson and Monte Sahlin introduce the 2018 Winter Fundraising drive in this video report.
- Are Sunday Laws Coming? - by Reinder Bruinsma | 7 December 2018 | For a few weeks the supermarket close to the apartment building where we live is open on Sundays. Sunday shopping has long been a hotly debated issue in local politics. Until recently the influence of the religious parties was strong enough to frustrate the attempts by the […]
- News Briefs for Friday, December 7 - News reports from Newbold College, Columbia Union Conference, Washington DC, Australia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; the Philippines, Jamaica and Berrien Springs, Michigan From Naomi Gritt, Adventist Today Campus Representative at Newbold College in Berkshire, England: Every week, the Newbold Homeless Action Group drives to London to help the homeless. As it is getting colder now, they […]
- Conference Bans Independent “Loyalty Oath” Event - 6 December 2018 | During a regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday (December 4) the Adventist denomination’s Upper Columbia Conference (UCC) executive committee voted to ban the activities of the group promoting what they call the World Church Affirmation Sabbath (WCAS). Following a thoughtful and open discussion of the distractions being created in UCC churches as […]
- General Conference Creates Adventist “Brand Promise” - From ANN – 5 December 2018 | “We can help you understand the Bible to find freedom, healing and hope in Jesus.” So reads the Adventist Promise, a statement which the General Conference of the Adventist Church created to set a clear expectation of what the worldwide public can expect from all Adventist entities and […]