On August 7, North American Division (NAD) president Don Schneider strode into an Ohio hotel room at the close of the Adventist-Laymen’s Services and Industries (ASI) national convention. He was not happy.

Inside the room stood Ron Gladden, author of the popular handbook The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Churches (2003) and former Church Planting Director for both the North Pacific and Mid-America Union conferences. That encounter was his one last appeal to Ron, "asking him to build plans that can work within the Adventist Church."

But it didn’t work, and on August 9, Mission Catalyst Network (MCN) was launched with Gladden as directional leader.

A former speaker during summer SEEDs church growth conferences and workers meetings around the NAD, Ron Gladden explains that the purpose of MCN, a church planting organization, is to equip local churches to accomplish the Great Commission. Although NAD leadership labels it a new denomination, MCN counters that its planted congregations will be networked together less formally, through common doctrines and its three-member support staff currently based in Vancouver, Washington.

Explaining his motivation, Gladden states that "we made this decision in March 2004 when administrators expressed their strong support for the work of the Church Planting Center, but decided to discontinue the funding." Told by his union president that he was not allowed to raise private money to support the Center for fear that other forms of evangelism would suffer, Gladden was terminated and not offered any other position.

Speaking on his mobile phone while directing a field school of evangelism in Colorado, North American Division Evangelism Institute (NADEI) director Russell C. Burrill sounds troubled. "Sure everyone agrees that there is a problem with church structure, but I’ve chosen to better it inside, while Ron has now chosen to go outside." Distancing himself, Burrill adds that although Ron Gladden was associated with the church plant movement in North American, Ron was "never a part of division level church planting."

Gladden, who was director of the Adventist church assessment for the NAD, and attracted attention among Adventist and non-Adventist pastors eager for congregational growth, reports that the NAD did cover $25,000 of his salary. Responding to suggestions that he is starting a new denomination, Gladden writes:

We are not breaking away from Adventist membership. We desire to be a supporting, enabling ministry that proclaims the same message. If we compare the approved usage of tithe in 1901 with the way the denomination spends it today, it seems that the slippery slope consists of spending more and more of its resources on the higher levels of the organization, while the local church struggles to fulfill its mission.

According to the MCN leaders, they are Adventist in belief, but no longer Adventist in organizational philosophy. Their belief statement is linked to the fundamental twenty-seven beliefs listed at the Adventist Church Web site. Mission Catalyst Network also publishes a ten-point distillation, citing the official thirteen Seventh-day Adventist baptismal vows as evidence of acceptable doctrinal summary.

Speaking with Spectrum, Gladden states directly that working outside the Church has nothing to do with doctrine; rather, his concern is church structure and tithe. At MCN, the only link between the local church and headquarters will be the 10 percent of collections sent up from the membership and the organizational support sent down.

Gladden reasons in a letter sent to church leadership: "everyone knows that most Adventist ministries accept tithe;" he adds, we will "follow the lead of others with one exception. We are not pretending that we don’t accept it; we believe that the tithe is for the proclamation of the Adventist message and we will use it as efficiently as we can."

In his article, "Primacy of the Local Church and Tithe Distribution" published on the MCN Web site, Terry Pooler expresses frustration with a heavily layered church structure—conferences, union conferences, world divisions, General Conference—that uses tithe for expenses and payment of support personnel, whereas the local church cannot.

Weary of this criticism, Assistant to the NAD President for Communication Kermit Netteburg points out that in the last twenty years NAD union conferences have become smaller and leaner, with most having cut at least half their staff. He addresses complaints of a too-costly bureaucracy by suggesting that those who see church structure as overly stratified are employing "a nonexistent, pre-1980s straw man." Countering the claim that the church hierarchy absorbs too much of the tithe, Netteburg, who was also at the August 7 meeting with MCN in Ohio, adds that the General Conference, NAD, and its union conferences use only 9 percent of collected tithe for their operating costs.

In addition to Ron Gladden, MCN management includes Dennis Pumford as assistant leader and Liz Whitworth as business administrator. By mid-October, MCN projects to have five church plants in process. The first, located in Portland, Oregon, is lead by Pastor and Mrs. Steven Shomler, veterans from a SDA church plant in Minnesota. After passing through an official four-day evaluation and supplying the first $5,000, each church planting couple receives $15,000 from MCN to begin ministry. The first major goal of the MCN is to plant congregations in roughly three hundred of the largest urban centers in the United States.

Defending the success of NAD evangelism, Russell Burrill states that 1,211 new, named congregation starts—churches, companies, and groups—now exist, due in part to NAD church planting work since 1996. Don Schneider states in his August 10 letter to conference presidents that since 1996, "we’ve planted about 1,000 churches, most of which are still healthy, growing parts of the denomination."

Gladden points to official church statistics kept since 1996 showing a net gain of only 318 churches, adding that, of those, a high percentage are ethnic churches. Subtracted from the total, and counting other shifts, he states that NAD non-Hispanic white church membership is almost stagnant. In response, Burrill points out that those 318 churches exist as completely established churches with full constituency approval, which often takes many years, and that this official statistic does not reflect the many nascent church plants and growing companies.

During the August 7 meeting with Schneider, MCN asked the NAD to appoint a liaison to maintain good relations between the two organizations. In addition, MCN asked in writing for a NAD representative to be a voting member of the board. According to Netteburg, the NAD has not received an official request, and thus someone has yet to be assigned.

Gladden, who retains his Seventh-day Adventist membership, summarizes his rationale for planting outside the Church: "institutional Adventism prioritizes status quo and rewards mediocrity. Mission Catalyst Network provides a second way of proclaiming the same message with the opportunity to reinvest the lion’s share of the tithe back into the local mission."

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