Adventist Review

What Adventist Review is

Adventist Review is the official news and opinion magazine of the Seventh-day Adventist Church General Conference. It launched in 1849 as The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald — usually shortened to "the Review" by old-timers — and is published today out of Silver Spring, Maryland. The magazine combines denominational reporting, devotional content, theology essays, Sabbath-school support, and global mission stories under a single editorial roof.

In its current form the brand is a website (adventistreview.org), a monthly print magazine, a digital edition, a podcast network, and ARtv — a video channel that publishes interviews, sermons, and conference coverage. The site is the daily front door; the print magazine is the long-form monthly. Together they function as the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church's house newsroom and as a steady stream of devotional and theological reading for Adventist members.

Why Seventh-day Adventists use Adventist Review

The single biggest practical difference between Adventist Review and a general Christian news outlet like Christianity Today or Religion News Service is that the Review is in-house. It is the General Conference's own publication. When the world president writes a column, when a division reorganizes, when a doctrinal study committee publishes its findings, when a new Sabbath-school quarterly comes out — this is where Adventists read it first, and read it from primary sources rather than secondhand summaries.

That gives the Review a role inside the Seventh-day Adventist Church that almost no outside publication can fill. It is the thoughtful Adventist member's default homepage for denominational life. Pastors use it for sermon illustrations and conference news. Sabbath-school teachers use it for weekly lesson background. Members use it for mission stories about brothers and sisters in places they will never visit. For a global movement with congregations in more than 200 countries, that connective tissue matters — and the Review has been providing it, in one form or another, for more than 175 years.

Official SDA news + General Conference coverage: the denominational newswire

The Review's news operation is what most Adventists land on first. The front page runs a steady mix of stories from the General Conference headquarters in Silver Spring, the 13 world divisions, the union and local conferences, and Adventist-affiliated institutions — Loma Linda University and its medical centers, Andrews University, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), Hope Channel, the Adventist Health system, and the broader Adventist education network. When the General Conference Session convenes every five years, the Review is the publication of record for the proceedings — committee actions, delegate votes, plenary sessions, the elections of officers, and the sermons preached on the floor.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is the single most important function the magazine performs. There simply is not another outlet on the open web that covers SDA Church polity with this level of access, continuity, and detail. Religion News Service might run a story when something hits the wider news cycle. Christianity Today might cover an Adventist-relevant trend a few times a year. The Review covers the church's own business every day, with reporters and editors who know the names, the institutions, and the procedures. For anyone whose work, ministry, or membership intersects with the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church, this is the source.

Adventist theology and prophecy: the doctrinal heart of the publication

Alongside the news, the Review runs a steady stream of theology, devotional, and prophecy content shaped around the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. That includes regular features on the doctrines that mark Adventism as a distinct tradition — Sabbath observance from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the conditional immortality of the soul (the view that the dead sleep until the resurrection rather than passing immediately to a conscious afterlife), the Investigative or pre-Advent Judgment beginning in 1844, the sanctuary doctrine, the Three Angels' Messages of Revelation 14, and the prophetic role many Adventists ascribe to Ellen G. White, one of the church's 19th-century co-founders, whose devotional and theological writings are widely studied within the tradition.

Other Christian traditions hold different positions on each of these — different views of the Sabbath, different views of the intermediate state, different prophetic frameworks, different understandings of post-apostolic prophetic gifts. The Review is not trying to adjudicate those differences for outsiders; it is writing for Adventists, from inside the Adventist conversation, in the way an in-house publication does. That is a real strength if you are part of the tradition and want primary-source theology. It is also useful for non-Adventists who want to understand what Adventists actually teach about these doctrines, in their own words, rather than through summaries from outside the movement.

Mission stories from the global Adventist network: the long tail of the reporting

The third pillar of the Review is its mission coverage — and this is the thing most non-Adventists are unprepared for the first time they spend an hour on the site. The Seventh-day Adventist Church operates one of the larger global mission networks in Protestant Christianity: more than 22 million baptized members across more than 200 countries, around 9,500 schools, 230-plus hospitals and healthcare institutions, ADRA development work in roughly 120 countries, and a publishing and media footprint that reaches into hundreds of languages. The Review writes about this work weekly.

You get baptism reports from the Inter-American Division, school openings in the East-Central Africa Division, evangelistic series in Papua New Guinea, ADRA refugee response in the Middle East, profiles of physicians in Loma Linda-trained hospitals in the global south, and dispatches from the Trans-European Division. The format is partly journalism, partly testimony — somewhere between an NGO newsletter and a denominational paper of record. For Adventist members, it is the thread that keeps a globally dispersed church feeling like one body. For outside readers, it is an unusually rich window into a tradition whose international footprint is much larger than its North American profile suggests.

Pricing

Where Adventist Review falls behind

No serious cross-denominational news coverage. The Review is in-house. It is not trying to be Religion News Service or Christianity Today — it does not cover the wider Christian or interfaith landscape with anything like the breadth those outlets bring. If you want to know what is happening across global Christianity, you need a second source. The Review will tell you what the Seventh-day Adventist Church is doing; it will not be your front page for Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal, or mainline Protestant news.

A site design that lags the leading religion publications. The Review reads cleanly enough on desktop and mobile, but the typography, navigation, and content discovery are noticeably older-feeling than Christianity Today's recent redesign or RNS. Topic pages exist but are not deeply browseable. Search works but is not the best way to find old material. The archive is genuinely vast — millions of words of content stretching back decades — and the site does not surface that depth as elegantly as it could.

Limited interactive community. There is no real comment section, no discussion forum, no member-only social layer of the kind some Christian publications have experimented with. The publication-to-reader relationship here is one-way: the Review publishes, you read. For a denominational magazine that is a defensible choice, but readers who want to talk back will need to do it on social media or in other Adventist spaces.

Editorial range is intentionally narrow. Because the magazine is the General Conference's official voice, it does not function as a venue for internal critique or dissenting perspectives in the way independent Adventist outlets sometimes do. That is exactly what an in-house publication is supposed to be, and the Review does that job well — but readers who want a broader internal Adventist conversation will also want to look at independent SDA media like Spectrum or Adventist Today alongside it.

Adventist Review vs. Christianity Today vs. Charisma News

Different audiences, different jobs. Adventist Review is the official voice of the Seventh-day Adventist Church General Conference, written for Adventist members and pastors, and shaped around the 28 Fundamental Beliefs of the SDA tradition. Christianity Today is a broad evangelical magazine founded in 1956 by Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry, written for a cross-denominational evangelical Protestant readership without a single denominational allegiance. Charisma News sits inside the charismatic and Pentecostal stream of Protestant Christianity, with strong emphasis on Spirit-filled worship, prophecy, and the work of the Holy Spirit as Pentecostals and charismatics understand it.

Different strengths. Adventist Review is the best place on the web for primary-source reporting on the worldwide Adventist Church and for theology and prophecy content written from inside the SDA tradition. Christianity Today is broader — global evangelical news, longer-form magazine journalism, books and culture coverage, theological essays from across denominations, and one of the most respected editorial brands in Protestant publishing. Charisma News is narrower in the other direction — fast-moving daily news with a charismatic lens, strong on revival stories, end-times analysis, and political coverage from a conservative Christian angle.

How to choose. Use Adventist Review if you are Adventist or are trying to understand Adventism from primary sources. Use Christianity Today if you want serious cross-denominational evangelical journalism and longer reporting. Use Charisma News if you want daily news through a charismatic and Pentecostal lens. They overlap less than their shared "Christian news" label suggests, and most readers who care about religion coverage end up subscribing to at least two of them.

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