I received an email today that began, "Hello: I am one of the attorneys in the General Conference Office of General Counsel..."Dionne A. Parker, Associate General Counsel for the Seventh-day Adventist® World Headquarters recently left a high-intensity job at a Washington D.C. law firm to serve the General Conference as human resources and intellectual property matters czar for the General Conference, ADRA, Pacific Press, Review and Herald, North American Division, and Adventist Risk Management.
Part of that job is sending emails to bloggers like me and David Hamstra informing them that they are not allowed to use the church's logo or name. They're copyrighted, trademarked, registered, and protected by tanks and helicopters.
In an interview with the Adventist Review (reg. required), Parker stated that she became serious about law at Columbia Union College, and went on to receive a law degree from George Washington University.
Dionne Parker's position as protector of the copyrighted corporate church name is evidence that the church has come a long way from the Adventist pioneers who opposed organization and finally agreed to take an official name only to assure that members of the Adventist community could be pacifists with legal protection by belonging to an official organization opposed to war on moral grounds. As I've said, we have come a long way.
4 comments:
That's rich commentary. Thanks for sharing your press - both negative and positive. It is profoundly reassuring for me to know that others struggle between creative, prophetic voices and the status quo of the institution Church has become....
I think you've described the struggle of the church as a whole - the struggle between creativity, prophetic witness, and protectionism and status quo on the other hand.
Only a few in any faith community are able to successfully balance those tensions, and fewer still do so successfully in Adventism.
I think your caricature should have included her pouring water on the flames of the logo.
All those years we tried to get people to be proud of being Adventist ... now comes a lawyer who says you can't use the name unless we say so. And yet Seventh-day Adventist Kinship continues to go its merry way, because when Dionne's predecessors tried to stop that organization's use of the name, a judge said, "Are you kidding?"
Lighten up guys!!! Everybody has a job to do. I like the idea of pouring water on the flames of the logo. Can you really add that to the caricature?
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