Mission 360 Magazine Turns 10

Mission 360, the official mission magazine of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, is celebrating 10 years of journalism that shows mission offerings at work.

The quarterly publication was established in April 2013 as the place to find information about a full range of official Adventist Church mission initiatives, including international missionaries, short-term volunteers, Global Mission pioneers, and tentmakers.

“It shows how the full spectrum of the church’s mission initiatives work together to advance the gospel, and it clearly shows church members how their mission offerings are making a difference around the world,” Gary Krause, director of Adventist Mission, said. Adventist Mission produces Mission 360.

Mission 360 was the brainchild of G.T. Ng, who, as General Conference secretary, envisioned a magazine that would showcase the broad range of the church’s mission initiatives that are supported by mission offerings. He expressed delight with the result: a print and digital magazine that promotes and reports mission activities and challenges around the world in one united voice.

“Readers get the impression that missionaries come in many varieties,” he said. “They are all missionaries, whether they are short-term volunteers, long-term cross-cultural International Service Employees, One Year in Mission young people, tentmakers, [or] Global Mission pioneers.”

Krause, who worked closely with Ng and serves as the magazine’s consulting editor, said that Ng wanted church members to be able to see their mission offerings at work. Mission 360 is meeting that goal, but the challenge, he added, is that “we need to help more Adventists learn about the magazine and how they can easily read it online in many different languages.”

Mission 360 is published in English digitally and in print, and a few issues have been published digitally in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Only the Beginning

Laurie Falvo, the current editor who has served on the magazine’s staff since its creation, said that the magazine’s 10-year anniversary is only the beginning.

“My goal is to help as many church members as possible to be able to experience the challenges and successes of Adventist mission and to be able to help hasten Jesus’ coming by supporting it through their prayers, finances, and service,” she said. “I would like to have the magazine translated every quarter.”

Falvo called it a privilege to have been able to publish many powerful and inspiring mission stories over the past decade. Asked to choose a favorite, she mentioned a story called “The Man with the Golden Tooth,” published in the third quarter of 2019. The story, by Galina Stele, is about a Canadian minister named T. T. Babienco, whom the General Conference sent to China to supervise Russian-speaking Adventist churches and scattered believers in 1920.

“This story has it all: danger, suspense, daring, unflinching loyalty, the heat of battle between good and evil, and a twist of events that left me in awe of God’s power and love,” Falvo said. “In the words of the author, ‘His experience reveals the long-lasting consequences of one Christian life fully dedicated to God.’ ”

New and Daring Initiatives

Moving forward, the magazine will have opportunities to report on new and daring mission initiatives, Erton Köhler, who took the reins from Ng as General Conference secretary in 2021, said.

“I envision this magazine as a great source of inspiring testimonies and special reports about our front-line mission projects, and as a way to share new strategic initiatives with the church,” he said. “This is something that the magazine has being doing the last 10 years, but we can renew the ways we are using these different initiatives to engage people.”

He said the Adventist Church needs to develop more daring projects that get it out of its regular routine.

“This is a time when the world is falling apart,” he said. “We need to be more relevant in the ways we approach our mission, raising projects and challenging the church to be involved in initiatives that can really reach the world and see Jesus coming in the clouds of heaven in our generation.”

The original version of this story was posted on the Adventist Mission website.