Next year the Seventh-day Adventist world church is taking its annual planning session on the road.

Plans are underway to hold the church’s Annual Council in Manila in October of 2008. Philippine Ambassador Willy C. Gaa said he was pleased to welcome Adventist delegates to his country next year, he told church officials in an August 30 visit to the world church’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States.

The church’s Annual Council is usually held in October at the church’s headquarters near Washington, D.C. The last such meeting held outside the United States was in 1998 in Brazil.

“The Philippines is probably one of the very few countries in Asia where freedom of religion is respected,” Gaa told Adventist world church President Jan Paulsen and other church leaders, including a delegation of Philippine citizens employed at the church’s headquarters.

Church leaders commended the Philippine government for supporting religious freedom, noting President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s hour-long meeting with delegates from the International Religious Liberty Association during its 2002 world congress.

Both Gaa and Paulsen remarked on the Adventist Church’s impact in the South Asian nation during their first meeting. Gaa thanked Adventists for humanitarian programs the church has implemented there.

“I’m aware what the church has given to its members and also to the community,” Gaa said.

Paulsen said the Adventist Church has long committed to raising awareness of health issues and establishing educational infrastructure—the church operates one of the largest global network of integrated private schools, second only to the Roman Catholic Church, the most prominent faith in the Philippines.

“Clearly we are also dealing with eternity and spiritual values, but we also have to address the life we are now living in,” Paulsen said.

More than half a million Seventh-day Adventists live in the Philippines.