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Massive Evangelism Campaign in Papua New Guinea Draws 100,000 and Baptizes 4,500
Submitted: Sep 5, 2012
By AT News Team with Reports from the Adventist Review News Staff
A public evangelism campaign in the South Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG) ended with the baptism of at least 4,500 new members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Attendance on the final night in Port Moresby, the largest city and the national capital, was over 100,000, according to reports supplied to Adventist Today by the Adventist Review news staff. This is a number equal to half the population of the city. Organizers say this is the largest public audience to hear the Adventist messages preached in English in the history of the denomination.
The campaign was led by John Carter, a veteran evangelist from Australia currently based in California. It was by far the largest audience he has addressed in his 50 years as an evangelist. The crowd was so large it could not fit in the giant Sir John Guise Stadium, a soccer venue. Thousands listened to the public address system standing outside or sitting in their cars. Another 5,000 sat on the grass listening in the dark at a second soccer field down the road. The local conference hastily erected a giant screen so this crowd could see the visuals.
The baptism ceremony itself was a huge operation. There are 60 Adventist churches in the city of Port Moresby. The night before, pastors mingled with those who answered an altar call. The pastors directed each new convert to a specific congregation. At the Sabbath morning baptism the candidates stood with their congregation.
Because of the large number of people to be baptized, ordained ministers from other conferences were called in to help. The event was held at a shallow ocean beach and 50 pastors stood in waist-deep water about 200 feet offshore as lines of candidates walked out to them. The pastors each baptized about 100 people.The final session of the campaign was held six hours later. At that meeting another 3,000 people requested baptism and will be baptized later. If all of them follow through, the campaign will have added about 8,000 new church members. On August 18 the Adventist churches in Port Moresby were all crowded. “We had a wonderful, blessed Sabbath,” said Cameron Wari, coordinator of follow-up activities. “All the newly baptized members were welcomed by the churches as part of a big family. Most of the church leaders realized that there was not going to be enough room in their churches to accommodate the influx.”
The membership of the Adventist Church in PNG was about 260,000 according to official reports. There are more than 3,500 local congregations in the country. The denomination grew at rapid rates (six to twelve percent per year) in the 1980s and then slowed to an average annual growth rate of five percent in the 1990s. Over the last decade the growth rate in PNG has been about the same as it was in North America, around two percent per year.
The government census reports nearly three times as many people who identified themselves as Adventists. In fact 10 percent of the population says they are Adventists. That is 25 times the percentage of Americans who identify themselves in national surveys as Adventists. This makes the Adventist faith the fourth largest religion in PNG, very close in size to the United Church (a mainline Protestant merger), about half the size of the Lutheran Church and a third the number of Catholics.
Pacific Adventist University began as a college in 1983 and was given a university charter by the government in 1997. It has 1,100 students on four campuses with a faculty of about 100. Two years ago it launched an FM radio station that can be heard throughout the national capital region. The denomination also operates three secondary schools and six medical clinics in the country. The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) in PNG has a staff of 56 and an annual budget of a little over $1 million, according to its most recent annual report. It is involved with HIV-AIDS prevention, construction of village water systems, adult literacy education and other projects. The Adventist Church also sponsors the Flying Doctor Service that brings mobile clinics to isolated rural areas.
PNG is among the poorest nations on the globe with a third of its population living on a dollar a day or less. The Adventist Church’s investment in education and health care has been significant to the progress this country is making, and ADRA is in the forefront of community development. The result is that a significant portion of the emerging middle class in PNG has an Adventist family connection even if they are not active members.
Last fall Adventist Today reported on a constitutional crisis in PNG in which Adventists held key positions on both sides. Two men claimed the office of prime minister at the same time. The deputy of one candidate and the chief of staff of the other candidate were both members of the Adventist Church, as are a number of members of parliament.
The report on the evangelism campaign and the accompanying pictures were supplied to Adventist Today by the Adventist Review.
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Does PNG Adventism support WO?
It used to be the practice not to baptise people until they had spent 6-12 months in a baptismal class. But exceptions have always been made for foreign evangelists who want to see the results of their campaign. It will be interesting to see how many remain in a year.
Does the Adventist Today news team have access to any up-to-date figures? During the time I served in union-level church public relations, such figures were made available from time to time for internal, strategic purposes—but discouragingly enough, the percentage of retention seemed to be on the decline and were not included in stories for the general Adventist public.
Retention of the new members is a critical issue. Getting into the baptistry is far easier than discipling them into a secure and lasting relationship with God. This is a major challenge area for the church. Success depends on having older members who are connected with the Holy Spirit and involved in gift-based ministry so they can nurture that connection in new members.
I have not analyzed why this occurred and I tend to look at it in somewhat the same way I look at an Adventist couple with many children, none of whom grow up to be practicing church members. I do not blame the parents—their children made adult choices; likewise those who stayed by to enjoy the entirety of the evangelistic series and were joyfully baptized, but failed to bond to the denomination as an institution. My hunch is that they bonded with the speaker (a very charismatic and entertaining fellow), and when the speaker left town, the baptized people lost their motivation to continue attending the Adventist church. Yet I suspect that if interviewed today, those same people would say attending those meetings brought them a wonderful Christian blessing, and by the way, whatever happened to that speaker who entertained them so ably and brought them back night after night?
I'm sure the cause and effect is more complicated than this, but it would seem that this may be a flaw in need of serious remediation, if we are to invest our church dollars in this kind of outreach as a prime method of stimulating membership grown. That said, I would not be an Adventist today (or might not have been conceived at all) had my mother as a teenager not attended a series of evangelism and been baptized—on her own, without the general support of her family—which in turn led to her meeting my father and their being married a few years later. Much of the character of Adventism today—most good, but some unfortunate—is attributable to the evangelistic methods employed diligently through the years by dedicated public evangelists, pastors, and conference leaders in the public arenas of our towns and cities.
The fallacy of the Adventist evangelistic meetings is to assume that all those who are baptized have become members; rather than accepting Christ as in the early church: no lengthy after sessions which took much longer to "explain" what they had been baptized INTO. "Numbers baptized" is the sole criteria to proclaim success, and each evangelist keeps tabs of the number he has baptized in his whole career. Any business with salesmen who counted only "first-time buyers" and never was concerned about return customers would soon go out of business.
This is why it is kept from the members: if they truly knew the attrition rates for such widely advertised meetings and page layouts in the Review, the giving would greatly decrease. So keep the members in the dark, and keep telling them of the great successes.
We should never, never, question the message for high attrition. Simply question the method. Did it ever occur that messages of apocalyptic doom do not attract the average person today?
That is, from the first world countries. I do not know the level of education in PNG, so evidently, what has seemingly been so fruitful there should not be the same messge and method for the entire world. Certain people and their situations are impressed by different messages and methods.
This must be true, as when has a similar crusade in the first world had even 1/4th of the results?
"How much better it would have been if the first messenger of truth had faithfully and thoroughly educated these converts in regard to all essential matters, even if fewer had been added to the church under his labors. God would be better pleased to have six thoroughly converted to the truth than to have sixty make a profession and yet not be truly converted." {CS 104.3}
What is the educational level and did the parents read SDA info along with the meetings? The article reported that the people there are the poorest in the area. Is it possible that baptisms there are when someone accepts the SDA message and afterward are in classes to learn the doctrines, unlike in the states where baptismal candidates spend time studying all the doctrines before baptizing. People here are not eager "joiners," but in a country that is "dirt poor" according to the report, there is nothing to lose by joining this church.
So many unanswered questions. Would love to know more. They should "count their chickens after they've hatched"--meaning a year afterward, then report how many are still attending church.
The big debate was whether these young were sufficiently prepared for baptism, especially since these men were from an Islamic background and thus new little of Christianity. Some argued the examle of the Eithiopian, who was baptised on the spot. Others, myself included, is that we were perhaps misleading them a little, insofar as they didn't know what they were signing up to, especially not really knowing about the SDA Church as distinct from other types of Christian denominations. Moreover, there were concerns that after baptism, inevitably perhaps not the same level of fervour will be shown in their ongoing discipleship as would ordinarily occur leading up to baptism.
The whole problem was exaccerbated because many of these men were likely to be transferred to other detention centres around the country, so it was presented as a now or never scenario for their baptism. The other huge problem is that by becoming a Christian, these men risked death by the Iranian Government is returned to Iran, so it was doubly important that they really knew what they were signing up to.
Long story short, there seemed to be a flurry of baptisms for a while. Whilst there have been a few sucesses, the programme doesn't have seemed to have produced too many long-term results.
People might become Adventists because of the 'truth' of our biblical knowledge, and with few exceptions they leave because of no longer believing in that biblical knowledge; rather they tend to leave because lasting relationships have not been formed in the Church.
You need to review your biology. Roosters do a lot more than crow.
[just kidding]
I agree that orchestrating these big events borders on the miraculous at times, but I do know that leadership purposely plans for these big events, not to tempt God, but the better to move the church emotionally and confirm faith of the wavering, while providing an emotional high of immense proportions.