Moving from publishing, and a private law practice, to becoming the general counsel for a worldwide church might seem a daunting task.

For Bob Kyte, however, the shift from his law practice and presidency of Pacific Press Publishing Association, a Seventh-day Adventist publishing house in Nampa, Idaho, United States, merely expands his horizon of more than 25 years of service to the church. The world church’s executive committee elected him to head the its Office of General Counsel, [OGC], on June 28, during a special meeting in St. Louis, Missouri.

“I will begin my work [at the church’s headquarters] in the first part of September,” Kyte, 51, said in a telephone interview from the Pacific Press headquarters. He added that Robert W. Nixon, longtime world church general counsel, will continue at least through the end of October as part of the transition.

Nixon, a 33-year veteran of the world headquarters, said it is traditional that new general counsels “build on the foundation of their predecessors. I believe Bob Kyte will be a master mason to build on the present structure of the OGC.”

Of Nixon, Kyte said, “I think that his service to the church has been extraordinary in leading the church’s legal needs and providing the kind of vision for legal structure during the church’s exponential growth.”

That growth—the worldwide Adventist church family now numbers more than 25 million people who attend weekly worship, including 14.3 million baptized members—may well present the greatest challenge. Expanding growth will bring with it expanding legal concerns, and Kyte said the OGC must be ready before those challenges arise.

A veteran of non-profit and corporate law whose clients included several Adventist church units in the Pacific Northwest, Kyte said his goal is to “try to be preventative in my view of law and anticipate the challenges that come up in a church structure that is [in] so many countries that we work now. I think OGC has to be sensitive to those challenges and to meet those for the church.”