TED Mission Focus as world-wide Church growth tops 20 million

8 March 2017 | St Albans, UK [Victor Hulbert with Andrew McChesney/Adventist Mission]  “A major drive to engage every church member in Total Member Involvement (TMI) has helped propel the Seventh-day Adventist Church past 20 million members for the first time in its history,” states Andrew McChesney, writing for Adventist Mission.

What is the secret? With a record 1.2 million people baptised last year, leaders are giving credit to church members who have fully endorsed the church’s Total Member Involvement initiative.

“The Holy Spirit is leading our church members to be so actively involved in every aspect of personal and public witness,” World Church president, Elder Ted Wilson wrote to McChesney. “The engagement of lay people in Total Member Involvement is so important to what we are seeing happen in the World Church,” he said.

Church growth and mission is equally a central part of leadership strategy across the Trans-European Division. “This is a very real mission field,” states TED president, Raafat Kamal. Net membership growth has been slow over recent years with an increase of just 0.94 percent in 2016. Recently, some areas such as Finland, Serbia and the UK have seen success with traditional evangelistic methods, but, says Kamal, “it is every member making a commitment to God and to their neighbour that will swing the pendulum in the right direction.”

Kamal explains TMI in very simple language: “Every Adventist Christian,” he says, “is a church planter. Every home is a church and every church building is an operation theatre to save lives.” He adds, “I pray for God’s special intervention to create a seismic shift in demystifying ‘mission’, where we take Christ into people’s lives in the context of relationships.”

This is happening. Fifty-two mission focused reports appeared on the TED website during 2016. They are simply a small sample of the activity that is happening across the Division. Health clubs in South East Europe, outward looking Pathfinder clubs in Scandinavia, strategic church plants in the Netherlands and the UK – these are all part of initiatives that can help turn the tide.

The Sabbath sofa, a casual outreach programme developed by three enthusiastic ministers in the UK, has now spread its influence to Poland, the Netherlands and other European countries. Most recently it was in Romania – and the first time in an indoor shopping mall as part of their evangelistic initiative. [See video interview] Vili Costescu, South England Conference Media director, sees this as one of the new ways to engage the public – simply putting a white sofa in an open space, sitting, and inviting the public to engage with them about rest. The recent Romanian experiment has led to 500 new people engaging on Facebook, most of whom had never heard of the Sabbath before. “It is a great and ancient concept that we have been keeping a secret as an Adventist family,” he said.

Sabbath is a secret no more – as is equally true of the holistic Adventist lifestyle, one of the reasons the TED, for the first time in its history, employed a full-time Health director. That is already paying dividends and is about to expand with the implementation across the TED, of the Complete Health Improvement Programme (CHIP), a lifestyle enrichment programme.

There are no simple or easy solutions to mission success in Europe. The American freethinker and journalist, H L Mencken, once wrote, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem–neat, plausible, and wrong.” [Prejudices: Second Series, 1920.] But what is true in Europe as in the rest of the world is a thought that Elder Mark Finley likes to emphasise, “The best form of evangelism is doing something.” That “something” can cover a range of activities adapted to culture and need.

“We have to explore and be creative,” Daniel Duda, TED Adventist Mission director states. Through the TED Mission board he has just facilitated creative evangelism grants for a variety of projects. These include a drama on the Book for Daniel for cities in Latvia, a presence at a campus festival in Hungary, a design academy for the disabled in Bosnia and a reformation history project in Serbia. More projects and in the pipeline. The TED Mission Board claims an annual  £932,000 budget with an additonal £700,000 of tithe reciepts also being focused back towards local leadership specifically for their local evangelism. Seed money to support creative evangelism is a significant priority. [See: Holistic, creative outreach in South East European Union.]

The countries of the Trans-European Division are a tough mission field, but, states Duda, “that toughness was never a problem for our pioneers when they sent out missionaries across the world. Five hundred years after the reformation it should not be a problem for the mission which is now here at home.”

With over 87,000 members across the 22 countries of the TED, and with a commitment to TMI and mission, the Adventist church is committed to making God known in Europe. [tedNEWS]

SEE ALSO:
Adventist Mission: Propelled by TMI, Adventist Church Tops 20 Million Members
Adventist Review: Inspired by Romania, Church Leaders to Take Total Member Involvement Evangelism Across Europe
tedNEWS: Growing Healthy relationships – Sharing Mission

tedNEWS Staff: Victor Hulbert, editor; Esti Pujic, associate editor
119 St Peter’s Street, St Albans, Herts, AL1 3EY, England
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.ted.adventist.org
tedNEWS is an information bulletin issued by the communication department of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Trans-European Division.