Booming Adventists

In the basement of Cleveland's huge Public Auditorium, vegetarian restaurants were serving the kind of meals preferred by strict Seventh-day Adventists. In the gallery two church workers patiently used sign language to translate the proceedings on the floor for deaf-mute visitors. No detail was left to chance by the Adventists' 48th quadrennial World Conference, a smoothly run, ten-day meeting of more than 1,000 delegates from 90 countries, including such Red nations as Poland and Yugoslavia. During services on Saturday --the Adventist Sabbath--20,000 visitors came to pray or watch.

Delegates heard reports that Adventist membership at the present is 1,102,910, having doubled in the past ten years (up from 75,000 at the beginning of the century). Proportionately, the Adventists also make the biggest financial contributions to their church--more than $225 million in the past four years. To the Cleveland conference, delegates brought $1,260,500 in cash and checks for missionary work, used a Brink's truck with gun-toting guards to haul it off safely.

The Adventists' money is carefully spent. They maintain more than 5,000 health and welfare organizations, run 4,985 schools (served by 11,775 teachers) and 42 publishing houses. But the Adventists also proved that they are as skilled in words as they are enterprising in works. Samples from the conference floor:

P: On the coming "end of the world": "In this atomic age," said Dr. Francis D. Nichol, editor of the Adventists' Review and Herald, "we hear frightened scientists and many others beginning to use a phrase that formerly appeared to be the monopoly of Adventist preachers."

P: On alcohol: "No single factor," said Temperance Department Head W. A. Scharffenberg, "has so militated against advance of Christian missions in Eastern countries as the Western 'hangover.' "

P: On family life: "Better to have a linoleum rug so kids can bring their friends home than a Persian carpet they can't set foot on," philosophized Texas Pastor Fordyce Detamore. Each family, he said, needs a "social secretary."

P: On outer space: "No one who believes in the Bible," said Adventist Vice President A. L. Ham, "can doubt the ultimate reality of space travel."

P: On life: "Giving is living," said Parkin Christian, 74, great-great-grandson of Mutiny on the Bounty's Fletcher Christian. Rugged (6 ft. 3 in.) ex-Magistrate Christian heads the Adventist Church on Pitcairn Island (in the South Pacific), whose inhabitants are all Adventists. "If only receiving," he added, "you die."

P: On integration: "We deplore as contrary to the spirit of the Gospel any effort to depreciate as inferior any nation or people, believing that all alike are precious in God's sight," said World President Reuben R. Figuhr. Later he cautioned against the dangers of moving too fast and trying "to force the issue."

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