Pacific Union Recorder

The Sunland-Tujunga, Living Stones and Lighthouse Community churches joined in a “mini-camp meeting” with Crescenta Valley Adventist School Oct. 1-2, 2010, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Seventh-day Adventist Church name.

“I learned about Seventh-day Adventism through an evangelistic series,” said Cary Fisher, pastor of the Sunland-Tujunga and Living Stones churches, in opening the meeting.  “It changed my life. The Adventist name is part of who I am.”

Speaking on one of several featured aspects of Adventism, Morre Dean, CEO and president of Glendale Adventist Medical Center, commented on the beginnings of Adventist health work in Glendale.

“The reason they started the Glendale Sanitarium (now Glendale Adventist Medical Center) was to meet people’s needs and to share God’s love. It was also important that, not only can we help you get better, we can show you a better way to live.” Other Adventist hospitals sharing that perspective within the Southern California Conference include White Memorial Medical Center and Simi Valley Hospital.

Speaker Roy Branson, associate dean of the Loma Linda University School of Religion, portrayed Adventist pioneers as reformers involved in temperance, anti-slavery and other moral reforms of their day. He profiled early Adventist leaders as proponents of Revelation’s “healing of the nations,” along with their deep commitment to the “salvation of the community.”

“They lived and implemented the healing of the nations,” Branson said, sharing vignettes of Adventist reformers from the denomination’s earliest days to more recent times of the first Civil Rights march in Selma, Alabama. “It was all part of Adventist belief in ‘making man whole,’ part of the ‘healing of the nations’.”

Sabbath’s presentations focused on the church present and future. “The family is crucial to holding a mature faith in the church family,” noted speaker V. Bailey Gillespie, professor of Theology and Christian Personality, La Sierra University. “We are a family. We hold something precious: people who love each other and care for each other, who see the best in each other. All church families are the parents and families of the children in the church.”

Glendale Adventist Medical Center and local Pathfinders donated lunch. Attendees gave donations for the meal, benefiting Crescenta Valley Adventist School’s scholarship fund. The Living Stones church provided haystacks for supper.

In the concluding message, Rogelio Paquini, pastor of the Spanish-American church and a former pastor of Lighthouse Community, meshed the camp meeting’s past, present and future themes by telling young people, “You are the church of today — and tomorrow.”