Jul 10, 2012 Silver Spring, Maryland, United States

ANN staff

Seventh-day Adventist world church leaders embarked upon a literature sharing campaign two years ago that surpassed in scale any literature project to date. The goal was to share more than 100 million copies of The Great Hope around the world.

Written by Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White, the abridged version of the book would be updated in its language and include 11 chapters of the original Great Controversy which was originally written in 1888 and revised in 1911.

Already, tens of millions of copies of the paperback book in more than 80 languages have already been distributed in several parts of the world and nearly as many electronic copies of the book have been downloaded. Most of the church’s world regions are still in the early phases of their distribution.

Rumors in some world regions claim that there is litigation involved with The Great Hope project. Those rumors are untrue. "We are seeing that tools like email, social media and SMS text messages can be tools for good as well as tools for mischief," said world church Public Relations Director Garrett Caldwell.

"If the church encountered legal action against such an important initiative it would be widely reported through official church news channels, such as the Adventist News Network," Caldwell said.

The distribution project will continue through 2013 with more than 170 million copies marked for sharing. See the project's website at greatcontroversyproject.adventist.org.

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