Conference Supported Education

Adventist education is in a national state of decline and has been so since the 1980's. This has resulted in significate financial stress on most of our schools leaving many classrooms in need of books and equipment. The CCC is no different.

The Central Conference has exceeded the target evangelistic dallors at Camp Meeting by 4.5 million dollars over the last 5 years. It would be wonderful if the Conference could take a small portion of those excess dollars and provide some badly needed services to our children.

(1) The Conference owns a tractor-trailer rig to move Pastors and their belongings. The truck sits there day after day. This truck could be used for a mobile science lab that would benefit the schools greatly. Science equipment is typically expensive but is only used for a short time during the year for specific experiments.
Centralization of the science equipment would reduce the total cost to each school and at the same time provide superior equipment to all schools.

(2) Each campus could use help from an additional Bible Worker or Chaplin similar to other Adventist campuses in the East.

(3) Individual school campuses do not have sufficient technological help to take advantage of distance learning. Although not as good as direct teacher to student contact, distance learning is a powerful tool and is becoming better every day. There is an Adventist school in the Mid West that closed its main campus in favor of opening three smaller campuses that were about 30 miles apart. The three campuses are tied together with the internet. And each teacher (via the internet) teaches at all three campuses. The beauty is that you still have an on-site teacher using an off-site expert in a particular subject area. Everything is done in "real" time, so the children can ask questions. Centralized technology would be very beneficial.

2007 CCC Town Hall Meetings

The Central California Conference at Town Hall Meeting Central Church in Fresno prior to the 31st Constituency Session at MBA, November 11th. The meeting was poorly attended. There was a brief discussion about finding additional funds for Adventist education.

Evangelism or Silence, Our Choice

The Adventist faith is not well known or understood by the general public. This condition makes it difficult to encourage people to visit our institutions or churches. Most pastors are active within the denomination but are ill prepared to be effective outside of the church. It is our laymen population that has the greatest opportunity to interact with the community and share the faith.

Prior to coming into the church I did not know any Adventists. However after being baptized and attending Camp Meeting and other Adventist events I was completely surprised to realize that several of my fellow Rotarians were Adventists. In addition, several business people I know are practicing Adventists. I had no idea.

The silence of the Adventist layman speaks loudly to some of the reasons for our lack of congregational growth. I believe that AMACCC will allow us to restrategize this situation and reposition our congregation for growth through effective community communication and cooperation between the churches within the Central Valley.