While policies, procedures and stratagems are being discussed on the platform of the Edward Jones Dome, another narrative is unfolding in the hallways and corridors in the labyrinth of the building. Little narratives and sidelines become the untold story of the 58th General Conference Session of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

In fact, each General Conference Session has had these unheralded chronicles. Do a bit of people-watching outside the exhibit hall or in the dinner line, and you’ll find a multitude of friendships rekindled.

Young and old alike embrace and extravagantly gesture in languages that span the globe. Some friendships are from a bygone era when the Adventist movement sent myriads of Western missionaries into the far-flung reaches of the earth.

For Patricia Swan, from England, who spent 11 years as a missionary, “Seeing old friends ‘rolls back’ the years of separation as if we were there all along. It also gives me a taste of what heaven will be like.”

“It gives me great joy to see old friends and find out what they are doing,” says Helnio Judson Nogueira, from Brazil, who has attended six Sessions.

It is not unusual to see a little white-haired “saint” being embraced by the leader of a local church region from the other side of the world who had once been her pupil. Relationships strained by time and distance are rejoined as classmates, former colleagues and once close associates are reunited just outside the main hall.

Caribbean-born Dowell Chow, who has attended six such Sessions, enjoys “seeing old friends from different parts of the world. [It] is enriching and inspiring.”

This is the untold story of the Session: the familial relationships of delegates, attendees and guests. With all the work and procedural matters to clear up in the general sessions, one might think this conference is all about business.

But when tired of discussions of the fine points of parliamentary procedures, take a moment to sit in the hallways and just observe a church in transition. Listen to the languages being spoken as one group after another passes by, and understand the significance of how an organization that was begun by white socially radically minded people from the northeast of the United States now includes delegations of ethnicities and groups from almost every walk of life.

In a transient age it is nice for the world church to meet together in a spirit of festivity and global unity. With attendance at local Adventist camp meetings diminishing in North America, the General Conference Sessions serve as a meeting place for church members and leaders in not only a spiritual and political environment, but in a social atmosphere. 

In early world church sessions it was vital for church leadership, which did not meet very often, to discuss core vital issues concerning the church’s direction and goal. Although much of that same need exists today, it is also as critical to provide a meeting for the church to meet as a family.

Church leadership has its spring and autumn meetings each year in which policy and protocol are center stage. But it is the mingling of membership at Session that stands as the untold story, the collective telling of countless narratives walking the halls of the Edward Jones Dome.

*Irena Nesterova contributed to this article