When people think of the Seventh-day Adventist Church they often think of its explosive growth rate. Currently people are joining the church at a rate of about a million each year, with the total now standing at more than 14 million.
Walking around the booths in the exhibition hall of America’s Center in St Louis, Missouri, where Adventists are holding their quinquennial business meetings this week, you get an overwhelming sense of success. People from virtually every nation under the sun pack the aisles, listening to a range of musical performers, buying the latest evangelistic materials, picking up worship resources. And they are all smiling. These people are positively oozing good news, slapping each other on the back, shaking hands, exchanging high fives or hugging—whichever is appropriate for the culture.
But no church, not even the world-encircling Adventist Church, can be equally successful everywhere. So, where are those members from the difficult areas—the countries where the evangelism doesn’t work so well, where membership is declining instead of growing?
You have to look hard. You might as well walk past the booth advertising “Philippine Project Missions.” And the one for the “Northern Caribbean University.” And the smiling people with the colorful clothes on the “Valley View University” (apparently that’s in Ghana) and “Bolivian Union” booths. In fact, you’re probably best getting out of the exhibition hall altogether, which, after all, is something of a collective self-selecting success story.
Look hard enough though, and you might come across someone like Gavin Anthony, leader of the Adventist Church in Iceland. Here numerical growth has been more or less static for the last 10 years. How does Gavin feel when he hears of thousands being baptized in Brazil, and almost uncountable numbers joining the church in East Africa? Can he still hold his head high at a success-story region when his patch is Iceland, of all places?
Actually, Gavin himself is rather upbeat. Not in an overt way—he’s quietly spoken and, although he has no desire to draw attention to himself, he’s not shy either. Do all these examples of success get him down? Is he discouraged?
“Not at all,” he responds cheerfully. “I have seen God at work in my life and I can see Him working in the lives of the members here. We do have some problems that need addressing—we can be too concerned with our personal comfort and this can lead us to forget about the needs of those outside the church, but there is hope. There are good things happening. People are being baptized, even here.”
Despite slow growth in Iceland he rejoices in the expansion of the church in countries like Ghana.
“I think it’s great,” he says. “I’m very pleased for them. But here in Europe we have a different situation. We face different challenges in countries where secularism has squeezed God out of the culture. I can’t keep comparing myself to Ghanaians. I have to focus on my personal challenge—to deal with the issues we have in Iceland. And I’m confident. God is moving here and He’s going to show us ways to be more successful than we have been in working within a secular culture.”
Gavin is not alone. There are plenty of people at the conference who come from areas where it’s tough trying to promote Christianity. The issue of secularism is to the fore in Western Europe, but in other places political difficulties are the problem, and in others it’s opposition from other religious groups.
The key to the collective success of the Seventh-day Adventist Church seems to be the way it works as a world family. There’s no triumphalism, no competition. Strong growth in one area balances slower growth in another. Successes and challenges are shared.