Adventist

Seventy-three Adventist youth campers from St Vincent travelled to Dominica and laid the concrete blocks for the Boetica Seventh-day Adventist Church, destroyed by Hurricane Maria, in three days as part of a regional rebuilding mission.

Ephesus Seventh-day Adventist Church in St Maarten, destroyed by Hurricane Irma in September 2017, was rededicated 21 months later after members chose to keep worshipping in a tent on the church grounds.

Hurricane Maria destroyed or badly damaged 28 of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s 34 congregations in Dominica, along with four schools. Six months later, with thousands of families displaced, recovery on the island was still a challenge.

Months after the 2017 hurricanes, Adventist volunteers were still rebuilding roofs in the British Virgin Islands, where churches in Carrot Bay and Road Town and an Adventist school of more than 300 students had been badly damaged.

When fumes forced Cornwall Regional Hospital to move services in 2017, the Seventh-day Adventist West Jamaica Conference next door hosted dialysis, lab and clinic services, delaying its own skills centre by six months.

For its 125th anniversary the Seventh-day Adventist Church planned to refurbish Jamaica’s 173 police stations and 11 posts through its 730-plus congregations, after a $125,000 trial job on cells, barracks, plumbing and wiring at Islington, St Mary.

Two descendants of the first Adventist missionaries in the Bahamas objected to plans to lease the former Bahamas Academy building on Wulff Road to government, saying a building dedicated to God should not be handed over. The church said nothing had been signed.

Irwin Seventh-day Adventist Church spent almost a year, working in phases as money allowed, repairing the leaking, rotting home of 96-year-old Mary Dennison, replacing boards, windows, roofing and floors.

Duncans Seventh-day Adventist Church held a month-long crusade in a former rum bar in Logwood Walk, Trelawny, packing about 170 people into a 100-seat, 20-by-30-foot building and baptising a dozen people.

Forty Adventists in La Romana worshipped under a zinc roof on a dirt floor until world church leaders and Maranatha volunteers raised a new church, with restrooms and a well, in a single day for more than US$15,000.

The Men’s Fellowship of Mt Salem Seventh-day Adventist Church in St James built a new house for senior citizen Euphemia Raymond, paying for it through members’ dues and fundraising and doing the construction work themselves.