News Articles

Norm Middag, former North American Division Pathfinder, Adventurer, and Camp Ministries director, died suddenly on June 23, 2021, in Florida, where he and his wife, Barbara, retired in 2001. Middag was 91.

Several new employees will soon be joining the North American Division as those called to serve the church in certain positions move to new roles or retire. In June 2021, three positions were voted: vice president for Multilingual Ministries, Professional Services director, and Adventist Community Services associate director.

Among several retirements that were recently announced were leaders of two vital ministries of the North American Division — Lincoln Steed, editor of Liberty magazine, and Maitland DiPinto, director of Hope for Humanity.

Marissa Channer doesn’t know the exact moment her disease started, but she remembers a significant turning point with her health. It was in February 2016, around the same time she started her role as a financial services accountant at AdventHealth University in Florida.

Chest surgeons at Loma Linda University Health are the region’s pioneers in combining human skill with advanced technology by wielding surgical robots since 2018 to optimize already 250 patients’ experiences and outcomes from certain chest surgeries. “Loma Linda University Health is the first and only medical center in the Inland Empire to provide patients with this advantageous option for robotic thoracic surgery,” says Nguyen Le, M.D., FACS, a robotic chest surgeon at LLU.

On May 16, four community baby showers took place across Massachusetts in Attleboro, Clinton, Springfield, and Worcester. Each location provided physically distant access to free baby supplies and maternal wellness resources. With the help of community partners, a total of 30 families received essential baby supplies, clothes, diapers, toys, and more, as well as information on sleeping, lactation, and birthing techniques.

When the pandemic started, Southwestern Adventist University nursing graduates Dex Esmeralda (2019) and Luke Zabala (2018) were fresh in their careers. Little did they know, they would soon join thousands of nurses across the country experiencing a time unlike any other — encountering more trauma in a year than some nurses encounter in a lifetime. Yet both were prepared for the challenges at hand because of the clinical and spiritual training they received at SWAU.

Early in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in wide-spread quarantines that shut down church buildings all around the globe, many of us pastors, churches, and tech teams faced the challenge of trying to figure out how to do ministry effectively in a media space we had spent quite a bit of time demonizing. Upon making the plunge, however, attention naturally turned to two main things: how to make the technology actually work in these new spaces, and then how to create better programming that would grow bigger audiences — or at least just help us not lose the ones we already had.  

The North American Division honored three retiring vice presidents through a virtual event that gave colleagues the opportunity to express their gratitude and share memories of the outgoing leaders. Alvin Kibble, former vice president for executive coaching, training, development, public affairs and religious liberty, literature ministries, and social media and big data; Paul Brantley, vice president for strategy and assessment; and Gordon Pifher, vice president for media ministries, received heart-felt spoken and written messages on May 12, 2021, from administration and staff about the legacy they’ll leave behind as they enter retirement.

It Is Written has won 10 Telly Awards this year for five different programs: one gold, seven silver, and two bronze. Four awards, including the gold, were given to “The Trail of Tears,” the first It Is Written program examining the forced relocation of Native Americans. Additionally, "Every Word," the It Is Written one-minute daily devotional, was recognized for the first time.