The Seventh-day Adventist world church’s Global Mission (GM) committee voted in a Nov. 22 meeting to fund approximately U.S. $1.1 million for several hundred pioneering mission projects.

“I would like to think that one of the reasons people belong to the Seventh-day Adventist church is that they believe in the Gospel commission and that they are ambassadors of the Gospel,” Pastor Michael L. Ryan, a general vice president of the world church and chair of the GM committee, explained to ANN following the vote.

“When they see that we are spending more than $1.1 million in front-line church planting into areas where there never had been a Seventh-day Adventist in the history of the world, this should give [members] an assurance that the energies of the church are focused on the mission described in the Bible.”

Projects were approved for countries as diverse as Guatemala, Bangladesh, Haiti, India and Australia, among others. And while many of these countries have long had an Adventist presence, the projects funded in those lands are aimed at either unentered areas or to reach previously unreached groups of people.

According to Pastor Homer Trecartin, director of planning for the church’s Office of Adventist Mission, in the past five years, the world church has approved more than 6,300 project applications with a total value of U.S. $40.6 million. Of that amount, approximately $15 million, an average of 37 percent each year, comes from Global Mission funds. Local church areas provide the rest of the funding.