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There's Room for Everyone to Serve

Photo by New Life Church Collingwood from Flickr

Editorial by Jorge Aguero

In a previous issue, we featured a group identified as chaplains. This raised questions about the role and function of members and chaplains, and I want to clarify.

In the Seventh-day Adventist Church, chaplains are ministers with conference-issued credentials who are granted ecclesiastical endorsement to serve in specialized ministries on school campuses, in corrections and healthcare facilities, the military, the workplace and community. Whether salaried or volunteer, before using the title chaplain, a person must complete required training and fieldwork.

10 Demographic Trends Shaping America

Did you know that Asia has replaced Latin America (including Mexico) as the biggest source of new immigrants to the U.S.? This and nine other trends highlighted by the Pew Research Center below are shaping the demographics of the U.S. Read more here.

1. “Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades.” Studies find that by 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority.

Ohio Conference Transitions Headquarters to Dayton

Nearly 400 delegates at the recent Ohio Conference constituency voted to make the $3.2 million office building in Dayton the principle headquarters for conference business. In September 2017, local business owners gifted the building to the conference.

The conference spends $80,000 annually to operate the office in Mount Vernon, which increases each year due to the aging of the building. Funds generated by leasing a portion of the new building to Kettering Adventist HealthCare could save the conference up to $1 million in overhead. “These funds could help Ohio churches and schools fulfill their mission, vision, and ministry,” says Michael D. Gilkey, newly elected treasurer and CFO.

Blue Mountain Academy Opens Hospital Produce Stand

Story by Dave Morgan

Aaron Weber, the Pennsylvania Conference Blue Mountain Academy’s (BMA) director of operations, reports that the school’s agriculture program has recently impacted the local community like never before. “BMA agriculture was invited to pilot a Farmer’s Market in downtown’s Reading St. Joseph’s Hospital (Pa.),” Weber shares. “On May 1, BMA opened a produce stand in a renovated room close to the hospital’s main entrance. During the growing season—and potentially year-round—they are open each Tuesday from 12:30-5 p.m. Hospital administrators are not only making this produce market available to patients participating in VeggieRx, a healthy food incentive program, but are encouraging staff to shop there and are advertising the stand to the community.”

Sharing the Word

Photo by Ben Grey from Flickr

Editorial by Andre Hastick

Each day you and I use thousands of words; we share sentences to express our thoughts and feelings. Our intended messages, however, can sometimes get lost in translation. It is estimated that in the Scots language, spoken in the winter wonderland of the northern United Kingdom, there are more than 400 words for “snow.” I live in Maryland, where we make a big deal about any winter precipitation. In fact, it seems like our only term for snow is “School’s closed!” If Scots-speaking people tried to teach me about their snowfall without me experiencing it personally, their lesson would probably get lost in translation.

Praying God's Heart

Interview by V. Michelle Bernard

Through her book, One Thing I Ask, Debbie Luther Howell wants to lead Christians back to knowing God through His Word.

Through her book, One Thing I Ask, Debbie Luther Howell wants to lead Christians back to knowing God through His Word. “I want them to have a passion for the Bible because when they open its pages they sense His very presence,” says the member of the Chesapeake Conference’s New Hope church in Fulton, Md. Read our interview with Howell below:

Visitor Magazine: How has praying through the Bible impacted you personally?

Book Release: Walk the Pathway of Prayer

In her book, Walking the Pathway of Prayer, Violet Cox, Prayer Ministries director for the Allegheny West Conference, invites readers to journey with her and discover a more meaningful prayer life.

Cox writes about how she grew in her understanding of what prayer is (and isn't) and shares a story about the first time she prayed her own prayer as child. After seeing a pair of pretty green shoes, and praying that 'If God really heard her, He'd let her have the shoes.' A day or so later, her mother came home with the exact shoes she had prayed about.