In Inter-America, Church Leaders and Pastors Are Challenged to Focus on Retention of Members

Pastor Balvin Braham, assistant to the IAD president for evangelism, speaks during Inter-America’s Conservation and Discipleship Conference, from Minatitlán, Veracruz, México, Mar. 27, 2017. Image by IAD

March 28, 2017 | Minatitlán, Veracruz, México | Libna Stevens/IAD

Seventh-day Adventist Church leaders in the Inter-American Division (IAD) territory want to make sure that when a new believer joins one its 21,000 congregations, he or she will be spiritually nurtured, discipled, and become actively involved in the life of the church.

The message was loud and clear during a special retention conference held yesterday for ministers, evangelists, and active members, as thousands of evangelistic campaigns are wrapping up across the IAD territory this week. The five-hour conference event was streamed live over the internet from the Central Adventist Church in Santa Clara, Minatitlán, Mexico, and focused on best practices in retention and conservation of members.

“It is the responsibility of each one of us to work with those who come to Christ for salvation, so they can feel stronger in the faith,” said Pastor Israel Leito, president of the church in Inter-America as the event began.  “The end of evangelistic campaigns is not baptism, it is the whole life of the Christian from that moment on.”

Pastor Leito reflected on Isaiah 49 challenging ministers and leaders not to bypass the process of consolidating and actively engage members to become agents for the conservation of members in their local congregations.  “Consolidation [of members] never ends.”

Dr. David Trim, Director of the Adventist world church’s Office of Archives, Statistics and Research speaks during the live conference.

Conserving is part of the spiritual transformation process after baptism, said Pastor Balvin Braham, assistant to the IAD president for evangelism and organizer of the conference. “We want to be sure that people understand the dynamics when they are baptized,” added Braham. “The destination is not the church, the destination is the kingdom of God and that they will remain committed until Jesus comes.”

Braham said the conference was about an important component in the church’s “Lord Transform Me” comprehensive evangelism strategy, which focuses on motivating and fostering the spiritual transformation of members through daily study of the bible and daily prayer in efforts to disciple new and current members to be actively involved in the mission of the church.

The “Lord Transform Me” initiative goes beyond just discipling the nearly 170,000 new members that join the church in Inter-America every year. It’s about keeping the 3.7 million current membership in the IAD living a daily transformed life  and ensuring they don’t leave the church, said Braham.

Loss of Membership

The IAD has seen a loss of over 2 million members from 1965 to 2016, according to statistics presented by David Trim, Ph.D., director of the Office of Archives, Statistics and Research at the Adventist world church.  The number of losses reflects those who have dropped in membership and those who are missing on the church books, stated Dr. Trim during his presentation.

Graph shows the accessions and loss of church membership from 1965 to 2016 in the Inter-American Division territory.

Over the course of 52 years, the church in the IAD has had more than 6 million as a member of the church in Inter-America, and over 2 million of those have left, bringing a loss of 34 percent, explained Trim.  The number of losses undermines the number of accessions—or baptisms and profession of faith additions.

The church globally  has lost 14 million members during the past 52 years, a loss of 40 percent worldwide, stated Trim. “That means two out of five members will leave the church worldwide.”

“My concern is not about statistics,” said Trim. “Everyone of the numbers is a person, everyone is a soul that Jesus died to save and gave to us to take care of.”

The alarming figures have forced the church to look at why people leave the church, said Trim. “By working out why they left, we can work on how we can retain them,” he added, as he presented several findings from two recent surveys the world church shared.

“If we want the church to grow, we need to keep our members as well as bring new ones in,” Trim said.

Spiritual Growth of Members

Professor of Biblical Language and Literature at Howard University, Bertram Melbourne, Ph.D., referred to the early church experience in the New Testament to demonstrate how members were discipled, conserved, and engaged in sharing the gospel.

“After baptism comes membership and during that process of membership is where the nurturing takes place,” said Dr. Melbourne. That nurturing is followed by service, discipleship and the use of their spiritual gifts, he explained.

Sharing their transformation experience with others strengthens the faith of the new member, so “pairing seasoned members with new converts to go witnessing could be a good blessing for the Lord and in keeping with what Jesus did,” said Dr. Melbourne.

“Checking in on the spiritual growth of new members in a loving, nurturing small group or church can be very effective, added Dr. Melbourne. “Nurture new members, by being as gentle as a mother.”

Dr. Bertram Melbourne (right), professor of Biblical Language and Literature at Howard University.

Dr. Melbourne emphasized that a new member needs to develop seven friends in the church in order to get adjusted and stay in church, according to research.

The IAD will continue to focus on following through with an extensive discipleship program and conservation of members, top church leaders said.

According to Braham, the plan is to have a coordinator in each local church responsible for each of the five focus areas of the “Lord Transform Me” initiative: Transform and live, explore and learn, connect and share, proclaim and reap, and conserve and disciple.

“Our hope is that we will have all the active members of our church reaching up, reaching across, and also reaching out and that will have all the inactive members of our church revived, involved, and committed,” Braham said.

Conference speakers answered questions during a Q&A session at the end of the live program.

Leaders closed with a special prayer for the retention of members and guidance for pastors and leaders in finding the lost or missing members in local congregations across the Inter-American Division territory.

The live online program was viewed from 3,215 unique sites, in 43 countries around the world.

To view IAD’s retention conference, in English Spanish and French, go to

English and Spanish, HERE

French, HERE

To find presentations of the event, click on the “Presentations” section HERE