Where Spreadsheets Meet Miracles: Inside the Preparation of the 2025 General Conference Session
The General Conference Session Management team recounts the work, planning, prayer, and miracles that take place when preparing for the Adventist Church's largest gathering.
Moraya Truman, ANNJul 4, 2025, 1:49 AM
It took over five years of planning and fourteen major subcommittees. There are 1,100 exhibit booth spaces, more than 500 staff, and preparations for 50,000 worshipers. At its center is a small group of three sleep-deprived planners juggling room diagrams, vegetarian menus, and last-minute visa hiccups. Welcome to the invisible engine of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s 2025 General Conference (GC) Session.
Behind the headline numbers sits a small control room. George Egwakhe, an associate treasurer at the GC, doubles as Session Manager; Silvia Sicalo, the GC’s lead meeting planner, serves as Associate Session Manager; and Sabrina De Souza, an associate treasurer who will assume the role of Session Manager in 2030, rounds out the trio.
“In the end,” Sicalo says with a laugh, “it’s basically just the three of us everyone defaults to.”
Their official title is Session Management, the team that touches every one of the event’s fourteen major sub-committees, from stage programming to translation and security.
“Because one committee’s decision always affects another,” Egwakhe says, “we are members of each of the sub-committees of the GC Session.”
The result is a weekly calendar filled with cross-linked Zoom calls and color-coded spreadsheets, where a request for three extra microphones in Secretariat can ripple all the way to a catering floor plan.
For all the spreadsheets and freight schedules, Egwakhe says the real safety net is invisible.
“People are praying for us, and you can’t imagine the impact,” he admits. “Some nights [I] barely get three hours’ sleep; you wake up at 2 a.m. and the unfinished details flood your mind… It’s by God’s grace that we survive.”
Prayer, they add, has produced incredible results. De Souza points to the brand new GC Session app, submitted to Apple and Google with hardly a week to spare. It should have taken seven to ten days to clear the review and be approved; however, GC Communication Associate Director Sam Neves initiated a WhatsApp prayer chain the moment the upload was submitted.
“Sam said, ‘I’m going to start a prayer meeting and pray this gets released,’” she recalls. “We received approval in less than 24 hours. That can’t be anybody but God.”
The turnaround stunned even the tech teams that were working with the app. De Souza added, “No one knows how a brand-new app cleared in 24 hours, but it’s up, it’s running, it’s beautiful—seven days versus 24 hours. That’s just God.”
For Session Management, it’s the latest reminder that spreadsheets handle the logistics, but prayer handles the timeline.
Miracles, large and small, make the marathon feel worthwhile, the session managers say. Sicalo's own prayer is simple: “After ten years since our last full session and being apart, the Church will unite on mission so we can finish the work.”
Egwahke echoes her, adding that he prays every delegate returns home “on fire for God,” and the right leaders are elected to keep momentum moving.
What They Want You to See
The array of accents, outfits, and fellowship with members from around the world is the takeaway Session Management hopes weekend visitors don't miss, the leaders say.
“Seeing members from other parts of the world is eye-opening for many. Maybe someone from the U.S has never met someone from China, Ukraine, Nigeria, or Zimbabwe. It is their opportunity to meet someone who believes the same thing, but who lives in another part of the world,” says Sicalo.
Egwahke emphasizes further: “When you hear the repeated message of ‘I Will Go’, you will see that every one of us has a role to play. I hope some of them will take that home, and be on fire for God.”
Where the Schedule Ends and the Mission Begins
By 7 a.m. Thursday, July 3, every microphone cable must be taped down, and every 5,000-plate vegetarian buffet must be prepared for service. Ten days later, on July 13, the last hymns will fade, the crates will re-appear, and Session Management will focus on the final stretch.
Yet, Egwahke insists the real scoreboard isn’t the calendar: “I’m praying for the delegates,” he says. “If God can use them to leave here with a fresh vision… and if we elect leaders who’ll back that mission…then every lost hour of sleep is worth it.”
Sabrina, still marveling at the overnight app approval, sees a pattern: “Sometimes five-year plans bow to 24-hour miracles, and that’s when you know God’s running the schedule.”
So the trio’s hope, held up by a thousand spreadsheets and just as many whispered prayers, is simple: that every weekend visitor glimpses the global, quick-moving church they juggle daily. If that glimpse sparks one extra volunteer, one unexpected missionary, or one more 2 a.m. prayer chain, they’ll count GC Session 2025 a success long before the final crate rolls out of St. Louis.
For more information about the 2025 General Conference session, visit http://www.gcsession.org.
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