Thursday, January 8, 2009

Reviewing the Adventist Review

December 11, 2008
Vol. 185, No. 34

GENERAL COMMENTS
Well I’m back from a holiday hiatus with good news about this issue. Bouquets have been awarded to: The Inbox; Bill Knott’s editorial, This Remarkable Moment; and Roy Adam’s cover feature, Atheists Going for the Jugular. The rest of this edition of the Review is standard fare—informative and worth checking out.

COMMENTS
I appreciated the articles by Mark A. Kellner and Ansel Oliver, and the timely information regarding the financial situation of the Church.

Mark Kellner’s report, Adventist North American Membership Tops 1 Million, produced a deja vous response. (Note Alexander Carpenter’s Numbers and Evangelism, Spectrum Blog, 14 November, 2008.)

“Back in 2004 the Adventist Review News reported that:
North American Division membership has passed the one million mark-1,001,872 as of October 21, 2004. According to the most recent numbers helpfully available for us lay folk through the church's adventiststatistics.org, in 2006 the NAD recorded 1,041,715 members.

“I applaud the focus on weeding out the excess on the books, but if, as the secretary states, the NAD grew at a 2% rate over the last five years (including losses) than we should be just hovering around 1,100,000. (The 2003 membership was 992,046.) Four years later, the news is that the NAD tops 1 million?

“What's missing from the most recent Annual Council report in the Adventist Review is the actual 2007 number. Why?

“Also not included in the report: the amount of money invested by the division, unions, conferences, local churches and individuals in public evangelism during 2007.”


I’ll miss Sari Fordham’s socks and the young lady herself. She has provided some memorable columns.


Martin Butler and Gladys Neigel’s Simple Church: Getting Back to Basics is evangelism that has a better chance of producing lasting results than Revelation Seminars and big city campaigns. (I wonder how Butler and Neigel would spend the 2009, $1.000,000+ cLAim evangelistic effort?)

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