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Acting ADRA President Named

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Spectrum has learned that former General Conference treasurer Robert Rawson has accepted the position of acting ADRA president, while a search committee works to find a permanent successor.

Rawson, 75, served as GC treasurer from July 1995 to July 2002. When he retired in 2002, he and his wife Carolyn moved to a retirement community in Arizona.

Before being elected as one of the church’s top three officers on this day, June 30, in 1995 at the GC session in Utrecht, Rawson was treasurer for the North Pacific Union Conference. Originally from Oregon, Rawson worked as a financial administrator for church conferences, divisions, and educational institutions around the world for 44 years.

He was the business manager for Garden State and Mount Vernon academies before going to the Philippines in 1968, where he served as business manager for Philippine Union College, and then as treasurer for the Far Eastern  [now Asia Pacific] Division headquartered in Singapore.  In 1977, he went to the Adventist Media Center in Thousand Oaks, California, as the vice president for finance, until 1983.

In Arizona, Rawson worked with self-supporting ministry Gospel Outreach, traveling to southeast India regularly to meet with and train Gospel Outreach pioneer missionaries.

According to sources, another retired senior church administrator was first asked to serve as ADRA’s interim president, but turned down the post.

A seven-member search committee made up of ADRA board members and ADRA staff is conducting an international search to create a pool of individuals from which a permanent president can be chosen. No search process was undertaken when previous ADRA president Rudi Maier was appointed.

 

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