George Vandeman

George Edward Vandeman (October 21, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist who founded the It Is Written television ministry.

Vandeman was born on October 21, 1916. At the age of 21, he attended Emmanuel Missionary College in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He found a job working at a weekly 15-minute radio broadcast in Elkhart, Indiana. While there, he met Nellie Johnson and they were married the following year on October 2, 1938, in South Bend, Indiana. After completing his second year of college, Vandeman began working as a full-time evangelist. During a series of meetings in Muncie, Indiana, Nellie gave birth to their first child, George Jr. The birth of their sons Richard and Robert soon followed. The Vandeman's fourth child, Connie, was born in 1956.

Vandeman received his Master of Arts degree in speech and communication from the University of Michigan. His 1946 thesis was entitled, "Spurgeon's theory of preaching". He was then ordained as a minister, and worked as a field instructor in evangelism at Emmanuel Missionary College for four years. He then joined the Ministerial Association at the General Conference (world headquarters of the church) in 1947, taking the position of associate secretary, and at age 33 becoming one of the youngest to work in Adventist church leadership.

In the years following World War II, Vandeman and other charismatic Adventist speakers like Fordyce Detamore spearheaded a drive for the public evangelism of major cities. He conducted campaigns in Pittsburgh in 1948, Washington, D.C., in 1951 and London in 1952, amongst other places.

After returning from a mission project in England, he was asked by the new General Conference President Reuben Richard Figuhr to continue with the Christian television program. Six years earlier then-president James Lamar McElhany had convinced Vandeman to try television as a means of reaching others with the Gospel. As such, he created a six-month experimental evangelistic effort for television. At the time, he wasn't able to get the financial support he needed, and temporarily put the effort on hold.

In the mid-1950s Vandeman started work on a series of television programs called "It Is Written", which he planned to air for several weeks in an area as a warmup to an evangelistic program. In spring 1956, It Is Written launched its first telecast in black and white—a full-message, Bible study telecast in Washington, D.C. The program later became one of the first religious television programs to air in color. The program's title was based on the Bible verse Matthew 4:4, "It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God."

Vandeman ran the first It Is Written campaign in Fresno, California, in 1958, and later in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Philadelphia and other cities. The telecast was launched to all of California in 1962, and this effort was followed by a month-long series at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. By the mid-1960s it was being broadcast internationally on a weekly basis.

In 1971, the It Is Written production studios moved to the Adventist Media Center in Thousand Oaks, California. In 1975, Vandeman began conducting Revelation Seminars. The seminars consisted of a one-day, eight-hour Bible study followed by a luncheon. Over a course of 10 years, tens of thousands of It Is Written viewers traveled hundreds of miles to attend one of 300 seminars.