Mountain View Conference

Charleston Church Celebrates 50th Anniversary

Story by Kathy Pepper

At Mountain View Conference's constituency session, held Sunday, delegates re-elected their top two officers for a third term and they received good news about the financial picture of the smallest conference in the Columbia Union.

Story by Valerie Morikone

Story by Angelina Dickson

Children came away from a one-week program held at Mountain View Conference’s Braxton church in Gassaway, W.Va., excited about BLT. No not that kind of BLT, but the three-part Bible Lifestyle for Today (BLT) program that combined songs and dramatized audio Bible stories, information about anatomy and a hands-on cooking class.

Phil Balisciano was brought up in a nominal Protestant home where he was not grounded in the Word of God. So he set off early to pursue what he thought was his real purpose of life—“having a good time.” That was his philosophy, but God had His own deep and wonderful purposes for this party-lover.

“I’m sure it was the Lord’s idea,” Kester Erskine says with conviction when asked how the idea of running a thrift store came to him. “We thought about having something like the Samaritan Center down in Tennessee, and it just grew along. Marie, my wife, was right beside me every bit of the way. I was just going to start it and turn it over to somebody else.”

As the Parsons church, a very small congregation located 20 miles from Elkins, W.Va., puzzled over how best to witness to the local community, Mountain View Conference’s officers encouraged schools across the conference to develop evangelism projects in their local areas. Students and staff at the Highland Adventist School (HAS) in Elkins responded to the challenge. During the 2010-11 school year, they worked with Don Jacko, pastor of the Parsons and Elkins churches, and Parsons members to plan a 10-month evangelism cycle with health ministry as the emphasis.

On Sunday, March 7, local conference Disaster Response coordinators, along with their leadership teams, gathered at the Columbia Union Conference office for their annual advisory.