Dave Weigley

Terry Forde, who has been with the organization since 2011, will lead Montgomery County’s largest healthcare provider. 

Story by Tom Grant

Story by Adventist HealthCare; Photos by Tracey Brown

Story by Tom Grant

This week presidents of the Columbia Union’s eight conferences, two healthcare networks and university met in Columbia, Md., for executive-level board meetings. The week started with Presidents’ Council where each president shared praises and challenges from their field. On Tuesday each conference’s top-three officers met for Administrator’s Council where they handled the business of the union. They also heard a presentation on crisis communication from Celeste Ryan Blyden, Visitor publisher and editor, and author of the new book, Crisis Boot Camp, published by the North American Division. 
 

Today at the Columbia Union Conference Executive Committee meeting, the presidents of the union’s two healthcare systems made a donation that will make a dramatic difference in the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands of visually impaired people in India.

A. Allan Martin, PhD, didn’t mince words. A former professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University (Mich.) and a current young adult pastor at a thriving church in Texas, Martin hit the members of the Columbia Union Conference Executive Committee with stark numbers: some 60 to 70 percent of young people leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Over the course of three days, some 700 Columbia Union pastors and their spouses gathered in Baltimore for the union’s first pastors convention in nine years. Themed “iAbide” with the tagline “Strengthen, Renew, Replenish,” convention organizers set out to do just that.

Last Sabbath Dave Weigley, president of the Columbia Union Conference, honored former United States congressman Rep. Roscoe Bartlett at Chesapeake Conference’s Frederick (Md.) church where Bartlett is a member. Bartlett, 86, represented Maryland’s Sixth District from 1993-2013.

During the 11 o’clock service on Sabbath, January 5, Brenda Billingy, senior pastor of Allegheny East Conference’s (AEC) Metropolitan church in Hyattsville, Md., looked from her chair on the podium to the back of her church and wondered, “Why is the [Columbia] Union president here?” She soon found out. Her associate pastor, Marquis D. Johns, had planned a surprise ceremony, that included Columbia Union president Dave Weigley, executive secretary Rob Vandeman and treasurer Seth Bardu, to celebrate her ministerial credentials that had been recently revised to indicate that she is an ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister.