Along with thousands of my global brothers and sisters, I spent the first Sabbath of this month congregated in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

Before you start calling me names please read these three disclosures:

• I believe the earth was created in six contiguous recent 24-hour days.

Our sermon for this Sabbath comes from La Sierra University Church senior pastor Chris Oberg. The sermon is part of a series at the University Church entitled "Journey On: Authentic Adventist Christianity."

Chris opens with a conversation with Natalyn Rodriguez, who was baptized earlier in the service.

Starting at 4:00 in the video, Natalyn reads John 16:12-13, the scriptural passage upon which the sermon is based.

Chris takes time to explore the theological wanderings of the early Adventist community as they charted their spiritual course in the wake of the Great Disappointment.

On July 3, 2010, the new president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Ted Wilson, gave a sermon entitled “Go Forward.” Reaction to the sermon has been varied.

At his first press conference following his election as President of the Adventist Church in North America, Dan Jackson began by talking about education. "We have to be very intentional about education," he said. "We need to embrace our schools."

This is the third post in a nine-part series for the SPECTRUM/re-church Summer Reading Group. The nine posts will be drawn from chapters of Deep Church, by Jim Belcher. You can find the reading schedule here.

Ted N. C. Wilson did not become president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists until 2010. That is not to say he wasn't trying before that, according to the Adventist Caricaturist.

Fresh from Atlanta, 2010:

June 17, 2010 - Vol. 187, No. 17

GENERAL COMMENTS
Two articles deserve special attention in this issue. SAVORING THE WORD, information about the newly released Andrews Study Bible; and ADVENTIST LEADERSHIP. And don’t miss Andrew McChesney’s essay, PRESENCE, and the reflection, TRUST AND THE TEARS OF GOD.

INBOX
In light of Ted Wilson’s ordination sermon, Ric Tryon’s letter is prescient.

First the “Bad News”

I think I have finally recovered from the General Conference Session. Reflecting back on the experience, one of the elements I appreciated was the information sharing and the little community that developed via the Twitter tag #gcsession. In the press room or across the world, during the Session Adventists shared news and opined.

In case, Dear Reader, you are either not at all related to Adventism (in which case one wonders how you arrived at this article), or have been in a coma (real or ideological) for the last year or so: Adventism stands at the brink of several awkward ideological conflicts.

This is the second post in a nine-part series for the SPECTRUM/re-church Summer Reading Group. The nine posts will be drawn from chapters of Deep Church, by Jim Belcher. You can find the reading schedule here.

Should the Seventh-day Adventist Church strive to remain unique and distinctive in its beliefs and practices? Is our uniqueness a virtue?

During the past four or five decades the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Western world has changed dramatically. Today we see in the church a far broader range of ideas and behavior than would once have been tolerated. But not everyone feels comfortable with the concept of tolerance.

One group in our church looks to the past and wishes we could recapture a spiritual quality they feel we’ve lost. The other group looks to the future and longs for something they feel hasn't yet existed.