Delegates to the 60th Session of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventist, meeting in San Antonio, Texas, voted to re-elect Ted N. C. Wilson as its president for the quinquennium ending in 2020. When elected as 18-million members Adventist world leader in Atlanta, Georgia, he became the 20thpresident since the beginning of the church in 1863.
Accepting the nomination, Ted N. C. Wilson requested prayers of the church. He called for church members to lift up Christ and His righteousness, faithfulness to God’s Word and message, as well as church member involvement in witness and evangelism.
Wilson was born in Takoma Park, Maryland in the United States, on May 10, 1950, the son of former Adventist world church President Neal C. Wilson and Elinor E. Wilson.
Wilson spent part of his childhood in Egypt, and later began his church career as a pastor in 1974 in the Greater New York Conference. He served as an assistant director and then director of Metropolitan Ministries in New York from 1976 to 1981. He went on to serve in the denomination’s then Africa-Indian Ocean Division, based in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, until 1990. There he served as a departmental director and later as executive secretary.
Following his post in West Africa, he served for two years at the Adventist world church headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland in the United States, as an associate secretary. He went on to accept the position of president of the church’s Euro-Asia Division in Moscow, Russia, which he held from 1992 to 1996. Before his election to the office of the president in 2010, he served the church as it’s vice president.
He and his wife Nancy, a physical therapist, have three daughters and eight grandchildren.
Wilson holds a doctor of philosophy degree in religious education fron New York University, a master of divinity degree from Andrews University, and a master of science degree in public healty from Loma Linda University School of Public Health. In adition to English, he also speaks French and Russian.
