Revival & Reformation Planning Team Responds to 11 Days of Prayer Article
On January 3, Spectrum published a satirical article by Sevvy, a blogger at the humor website BarelyAdventist.com, entitled, “GC Schedules Worldwide 10 Days of Prayer Over 11 Days.” While that article was a humor piece, the General Conference Revival and Reformation planning team, responsible for the Ten Days of Prayer initiative, took it seriously enough to issue the following email response offering an explanation of the numbering of days (this is not satire, for those following along at home). -Ed.
Dear Barely Adventist,
We noticed that you caught on to the 11 calendar days included in the #10Days2015 prayer event this year. It’s reassuring to know that our church membership is raising the next generation to be clever and observant. Go you!
We’ve found that it’s a natural time for many churches to launch the event during their Wednesday night prayer meeting, and to end on Sabbath morning where people can share their stories of experiencing the power of prayer.
If you don’t mind us explaining, the 11-day span is somewhat of an optical illusion. It’s intended to be a nod to the “evenings and mornings” structure of that “literal, 6-day Creation” you mentioned. So the Ten Days event is set to begin the evening before (on the night of January 7th), and then run for ten consecutive days. If you count 10 evenings and mornings from the night of the 7th, you’ll end on Saturday morning of January 17th.
You’re right though, we probably could have included an explanation of this to make it more clear. That way Pastor Tan could have given a more satisfying answer to his super observant 4th-grade son.
On the bright side, his son sounds very smart and would probably make a great GC executive someday, with all that well-developed attention to detail! Perhaps we could consider him for the new accelerated leadership grooming and young interns program we’re organizing? Let us know if he’s interested!
It’s good to know the young people of our church are so closely engaged with what we do. We hope you’ll be praying somewhere, for at least 10 of the 11 days scheduled.
