GC Annual Council 2005 – Some Major Decisions

1. The Global Centre of World Evangelism, instituted earlier, was presented (brochure). Its evangelistic scope is wider than Global Mission which has the more specific purpose of reaching the unreached. Besides fostering creative initiatives among the divisions through special projects and developing cutting edge, contemporary, effective evangelistic resources, it will provide the following services:

• Pastors meetings – evangelistic symposiums
• Field Schools of evangelism with academic credit given
• Evangelistic pace setters – mentoring groups of 15-20 young pastors
• Satellite evangelistic series
• Evangelistic strategy sessions for divisions and unions
• Reaping series
• Seminars on:
  • Prayer,
  • Motivating and Training Laity,
  • Revitalizing Evangelistic Preaching,
  • Making Effective Appeals,
  • Reducing Apostasy and Nurturing New Believers.

2. A youth evangelism project named the Elijah Project was voted. It seeks to start up 2000 youth evangelistic campaigns before the GC session in June-July, 2005. All applications will go through the division Youth Department.* (117c)

3. A Discipleship Initiative was voted. It is based on a cooperation between the Personal Ministries, The Chaplaincy Ministries, and the Ministerial Association.* (19)

4. The Office of Mission Awareness: Previously ëdormantí function of the GC. Has changed after the study of the Mission Offerings last year. Gary Krause from the Global Mission Office has now been appointed director of this office, which produces the Sabbath School mission story and various other materials to foster mission awareness and offerings.

5. The Statistical Report showed that the world church had 13,663,497 members in June, 2004. At that time, there were 2,756 baptisms per day, 1,006,492 per year, and one baptism every 31 seconds. Each day, 5,135,464 million USD was given in tithe and offerings, which means close to 2 billion USD per year. The relation between world population and Adventist members shows this trend:

The TED shows a growth rate in 2003/2004 of 5,32% which puts us in the fifth place after Southern Asia (16,69%), South America (8,35%), Southern Africa-Indian Ocean (6,38), West-Central Africa (5,62). There is one Adventist in TED for every 6,040 person. Jamaica is now the country with the top concentration of Adventists.

6. A project was voted for distributing a set of Ellen White books to the world church members, calledëConnecting with Jesusí.

7. A new Fundamental Belief of the Church will be proposed to the GC Session 2005, called‘Growing in Christí. The suggestions received have been studied and the revised version was approved. Delegates to the session may speak to the motion on the floor.

8. A Seventh-day Adventist Philosophy of Music to serve as Guidelines was voted.

General Conference documents