By Monte Sahlin, September 11, 2017: Two of the biggest hurricanes on record have destroyed the homes of many people on a number of islands in the Caribbean, and in Texas and Florida. A major earthquake has destroyed cities in Mexico. And today many Americans remember the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington […]
by Finn F. Eckhoff A rewriting of Acts 15:1-18, based loosely on Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase The Message. It wasn’t long before some representatives showed up from GC insisting that no female pastors be ordained: “If you ordain female pastors and do not follow the GC Working Policy, you can’t be part of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.” […]
by Edward Reifsnyder The funeral for my neighbor and friend Jeff was held in his church, a congregation of the United Church of Christ. As we sat quietly before the service, not knowing anything about that denomination, I did a search on my phone. The denomination has evolved over more than three hundred years by […]
by Winona Winkler Wendth, 09/10/2017 On October 24, 1906, Hulda Stumpf, a forty-year-old stenography teacher at the Indiana Business College wrote to an administrator of the African Inland Mission and asked for an appointment to British East Africa, now Kenya. The African Inland Mission, a non-denominational Christian organization, […]
by Beverly J. Robinson-Rumble In her report to the church’s 2016 Spring Council, Heather-Dawn Small, director of the General Conference Women’s Ministries Department, presented items voted by the Women’s Ministries Advisory a few weeks earlier, including two statements prepared by official church study groups regarding Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Family Violence, and appealed for […]
By Stephen Ferguson Do Jesus and the Donald share a Weltanschauung? Is Donald Trump more like Jesus Christ than any other previous President in the history of the United States?[1] Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting there are any obvious similarities between this thrice-married 71-year-old billionaire from New York and the celibate 33-year-old […]
by William Vercio I am a 4th generation Adventist, which isn’t uncommon, and I’m over 60, which also isn’t uncommon, but when you look at those two things together, through my grandparents, who were alive when Ellen White was still alive, I have a connection to the church pioneers. My grandparents’ stories and practices gave […]
By Jim Hamstra, August 27, 2017: In July I attended the 8-day “Affirming Creation” conference sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist denomination’s Faith and Science Committee and the North American Division Office of Education. The conference included about 50 presentations by 25 different presenters, in St. George, Utah, as well as on the buses to and […]
by Melody Tan I am standing outside a cavernous hall, holding a clear plastic bag that contains several pens and pencils. My head is pounding; I’m wide-eyed with fear; my heart is about to burst out of my chest; and I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The reason? I’ve forgotten […]
By Shane Anderson, August 30, 2017: During the years that I’ve been a pastor in the Adventist church, I cannot recall a time when there was sharper, more enduring, and more pervasive division over a single issue than what currently exists over women’s ordination. In fact, it seems that we have discussed, argued […]
by Lawrence G. Downing, August 28, 2017: Each person’s life is a collage created by one’s life experiences, education, work, travels and relationships. Some events leave a more profound and lasting mark than others. For me, one segment of the pixels that are part of my collage is the time I spent in San Francisco […]
by Bill Garber, 08/24/2017 When Michigan Conference President Jay Gallimore accuses the leaders of ten union conferences from four divisions of the Seventh-day Adventist Church of having “surrendered to carnal worldliness” and having placed their regions into a state of “insubordination” and “rebellion” through “witchcraft,” starting with the issue of women’s ordination, something unusual […]