Annual Council Comment

[Gregory Matthews]

Thanks to Spectrum for the following:

The growth of administrators within Adventism has outpaced the growth of pastors and membership in recent years, according to studies done by the Adventist Office of Statistics, Archives, and Research. In

his report 1 to the General Conference Executive Committee on global trends, Archivist David Trim said the number of pastors increased by 85%, while the number of administrators grew by 300% since 1988. He suggested that examining the balance between administrators and pastor/evangelist workers might help us to see greater growth in the numbers of accessions.

Increasing the number of pastors might also help the church address the rate of retention. Currently, we lose approximately 40% of those who are baptized. Membership now stands at 23,967,592. Since 1965, 37,592,451 people have become members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Of those, 15,132,555 have chosen to leave.

In the global trends report, the number of accessions per pastor in each division was reviewed as well as the number per congregation. Tithe rates in each division were tallied, also, which may inform the conversation later in the week about tithe parity. The North American Division has the highest tithe per capita at $856, and the highest tithe per congregation at $235,546. The Divisions with the next highest tithe per capita are the European Divisions: the Inter-European Division (EUD) at $774 and the Trans-European Division (TED) at $728.