Atlanta, Georgia, United States, will be the site of the 2010 General Conference Session, the Seventh-day Adventist Church's top international meeting held every five years.
Atlanta, Georgia, United States, will be the site of the 2010 General Conference Session, the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s top international meeting held every five years.
“The search for a host city for 2010 began before we went to the Toronto Session in 2000,” said Linda de Leon, session planner. She explained that there are “very few cities in the world that have facilities necessary to accommodate a Session.”
Members of the Adventist Church’s executive committee voted April 18 to hold the Session in Atlanta after hearing presentations made by representatives from three cities: Indianapolis, Indiana, United States; Atlanta, Georgia, United States; and Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Atlanta, located in America’s southeast, was the site of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. There are some 140,000 Adventist Church members living within an eight-hour drive of Atlanta. Southern Adventist University in Tennessee, and Oakwood College in Alabama, are also within that radius.
The General Conference Session will be held in the Georgia Dome, a 71,500-seat stadium located in downtown Atlanta. Session exhibits will be housed in the adjacent Georgia World Congress Center. The two facilities are linked by underground walkways.
A number of factors played a role in the choice of Atlanta, says de Leon, including the willingness of Atlanta to guarantee some 7,000 downtown hotel rooms at competitive rates, and an offer to give rebates from the cost of each hotel room, which will then be applied to the cost of the convention facilities.
The most recent General Conference Session was held in Toronto, Canada, June 29 to July 8, 2000, where weekend crowds in Toronto’s SkyDome swelled to more than 70,000 people. The 2005 Session will be held in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.
Atlanta was voted as the 2010 Session host city by members of the executive committee of the Adventist Church, a group of church leaders, pastors and lay people from around the world, meeting April 18 and 19 at the church’s international headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States.
