The Georgia-Cumberland Conference actively started participating in the General Conference’s The Great Controversy Project in July 2023. Since then, hundreds of thousands of copies of Ellen White’s book have been distributed to individuals in Georgia and Tennessee. A total of 134 churches and eight schools within the Conference participated, and ordered a collective 200,000 English and 100,000 Spanish copies of the book. The Conference also included custom pages in the newly printed books that included QR codes, guiding readers to listen to the audio version of the book and to sign up for Bible studies, with people continuing to request the Bible studies.
Many churches have incorporated these books into their community outreach and evangelism efforts. The Greeneville, Tenn., Church not only joined the initiative, but embraced it as part of their church’s mission to serve their community.
“We ordered 25,000 copies of The Great Controversy,” says Nate Nelson, Greeneville intern pastor. “We had an evangelism initiative to hand out these books within a year. At first we held back because Messiah’s Mansion was coming through and we wanted everyone who came through to receive a copy of the book.” The members handed out around 3,500 copies to Messiah’s Mansion attendees.
The Greeneville Church also has a community service center which has a food pantry and gives out meals to those in their community. The center also received copies of the book which they hand out to people who come through. The church plans to hand out more copies of The Great Controversy in 2024, and use the content of the book to help address the needs in their local area. The church also has a team of dedicated members and Bible workers who reach out to the Bible study leads from the Greeneville area.
Many churches have already been blessed to see the impact the book has made on those who received a copy. Esteban López, personal ministries director at the Ooltewah, Tenn., Hispanic Church, received a follow-up visit by someone he gave a book to after a group from his church was handing them out in Chattanooga, Tenn.
“I gave a copy of The Great Controversy to the pastor of [another church],” said López. “After a week, he stopped by my office and told me he’s using it on Sundays at his church as a textbook.”
Gary Rustad, Georgia-Cumberland Conference president, describes the importance of this initiative by referencing Ellen White’s own words, where she wrote in Letter 281, “The Great Controversy should be very widely circulated. It contains the story of the past, the present, and the future. In its outline of the closing scenes of Earth’s history, it bears a powerful testimony in behalf of the truth. I am more anxious to see a wide circulation for this book than for any others I have written, for in The Great Controversy, the last message of warning to the world is given more distinctly than in any of my other books.”
Georgia-Cumberland | March 2024
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