Seventh-day Adventists in Chernovtsy are celebrating the baptism of 150 new believers--chiefly young people--following a nine-day evangelistic series.
Seventh-day Adventists in Chernovtsy are celebrating the baptism of 150 new believers—chiefly young people—following a nine-day evangelistic series. Local church leaders say the baptisms represent the area’s first response to the so-called “Sow 1 Billion” program—a worldwide Adventist Church effort to distribute 1,000 million invitations to study the Bible.
Throughout winter and early spring, church members in this southwestern Ukrainian city distributed thousands of Sow 1 Billion invitations and conducted hundreds of Bible studies.
Church leaders from across the Euro-Asia region—including Russia, Ukraine and many other eastern European republics—helped conduct the evangelistic series, held May 14 to 22. These church administrators were in Chernovtsy to attend the mid-year administrative meetings of the Adventist Church in Euro-Asia.
“Every morning, except Sabbath, the administrative meetings took place as usual, according to the different agenda topics,” explains Valery Ivanov, communication director for the Adventist Church in Euro-Asia. “But every evening, these same church leaders fanned out across the city and surrounding areas to 36 local churches to lead out in the evangelistic meetings.”
The baptisms took place in a downtown swimming pool on Saturday, or Sabbath, May 22, following a meeting in a theater located in the city center. Artur Stele, president of the church in Euro-Asia, Armando Miranda, a vice president of the world church, and Agustin Galicia, an associate secretary of the world church, all helped lead out in the day-long celebration.
Sow 1 Billion is a global initiative of the Adventist Church; already hundreds of millions of brochures have been printed and distributed in languages ranging from Japanese, to Kiswahili, to Creole. In the Euro-Asia region, Adventists plan to distribute a total of 50 million of these small invitations to study the Bible.
