BY ESTEBAN VALDES
SILVER SPRINGS, MD—The Mission Report Society has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with God over the past hundred years since the founding of the Adventist Church. Their exclusive contract with God means only the prayers, requests and supplications of MRS clients are answered. Recently, God has been bucking that trend by invoking the little-known Matthew 5.45 clause. In response to this recent development, the MRS sent representatives to the divine court to extend the contract keeping rights to divine providence exclusive to missionaries.
A slew of events in the last few months forced the MRS to kick start negotiations to preserve and extend the terms of their previous agreement. In Karachi, God fed a starving, Muslim family of four without any missionary solicitation. The missionary representative in Pakistan had been praying instead for the well-being of another family that recently converted to Adventism and was disappointed to discover that his prayer was answered only after God met the needs of the Muslim family. Meanwhile, God raised MRS eyebrows by healing a North Korean man dying of dengue fever despite the absence of any MRS representation in that country.
“Yeah, many of the leaders here got some nasty heartburn when those two stories were leaked to other news outlets. We don’t see any reason to upset the traditional agreement where we have sole rights as God’s public relations agents. In effect, we want to make sure that we report and we decide,” declared Max Jameson, director of the MRS Publications Department.
He elaborated that the terms of the agreement were easy to follow since God would only listen to the prayers of MRS members or MRS-affiliated groups. Their partnership entailed the MRS entering a country, converting several of their citizens, teaching them to follow the beliefs and practices of the MRS before using the new converts as models of obedience to attract other followers. By keeping stories of divine providence exclusive to the MRS, non-MRS members would sign-up, boosting their network. The MRS then parlays the conversions into profits through their media arm.
Jameson shared, “These converts share stories of how God has blessed them and we print these stories in books, magazine articles, Sabbath School quarterlies and Mission Reports. We also prefer to keep the location somewhere distant so that third parties aren’t able to verify our stories. For example, recently there was a drought in Africa. An MRS-member family prayed for rain so that their crops would grow and they could feed their children. Sure enough, God sent rain but only to that family, in keeping with the terms of our deal. The other non-MRS families died, but the MRS family survived so we included that story in our Sabbath School to boost the faith of other MRS members and to market ourselves to non-MRS families.”
The MRS has become a growing industry with a whole genre of books, magazines and documentaries touting their success and membership benefits. This allowed the MRS to shape and define God’s public image to their liking. God’s attempts to improve accessibility and to broaden the network of stories however, threatens to undermine their work.
“We want to preserve our exclusive access to God because our livelihoods and reputations are at stake. As some have noted, this might affect our membership when people find out that God doesn’t only hear the prayers of the righteous-us, but the unrighteous as well. We intend to twist some arms up there and flex our negotiating muscles so that we continue to get complete and absolute access to reports of divine providence.”
God has remained tight-lipped on God’s intentions although there is speculation that God will open access to other media groups, effectively ending MRS monopoly.
