Now we can proceed to the present era.
Yesterday the leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church, with world headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a membership of almost 30 million, voted on an article of
reorganization, based on a decade of long-standing differences and numerous lawsuits between regional church leaders in the United States, Canada, Western Europe and the rest of the world church. The preliminary agreement of reorganization, reached late Tuesday night, would separate the church into two distinct entities with no formal ties to each other.
This would be only the second time in its 161-year history that a major split has occurred. The world church would retain the name Seventh-day Adventists; the new church would be called the Christian Adventist Church (CAC). The first major split occurred about a decade ago with the formal separation of the SDA church in China from the church’s Maryland headquarters.
The tension started in earnest in 2009 with disagreement over issues of interpretation of biblical creation, women’s ordination, tithing, the gift of prophecy, and the relevancy of some of its doctrines; namely the doctrine of the Investigative Judgment, which has had a long history of detractors. Failure to come to any consensus eventually led to many church districts moving out on their own against the guidance of the church’s administrative body, known as the General Conference. (Christian News Media)
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