Adventist Church Welcomes 1.4 Million New Members in 2023

Statistical report shows baptismal numbers are up to pre-pandemic levels.

November 8, 2024 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Tor Tjeransen, Norwegian Union Conference

A total of 1.465 million new members were added to the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 2023, David Trim, director of the General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, said as he shared the Annual Statistical Report at the church’s Annual Council on October 13.

Trim pointed out that “2023 saw the highest number of net accessions of any year in church history, exceeding the 1.383 million added in 2018.” The number of accessions is now back on the same level as it was before the challenging years of 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although church members may rejoice over a large number of new members added to the fellowship, church growth is a function of both accessions and losses. In 2023, 836,905 people who were alive and well decided to leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church. That was the third highest year for net losses, after the peak in 2019, when statistics show 1,107,514 people left.

Trim showed a slide displaying membership data for the 59 years since 1965. In almost six decades the church has accepted 45,117,980 people into membership. In the same period, 19,392,486 membershave chosen to leave, he reported. “More than four of every tenchurch members are slipping away,” Trim said, while urging both General Conference Executive Committee members and church members to “be their brother’s keeper, and their sister’s too.”

An important metric to watch is how church membership is developing compared to population growth in the world.

“After all, if we were growing but the population were growing faster than us, our growth would be deceptive — it would be like trying to go up a down escalator,” Trim said.

Trim showed that the church is making progress in this regard. As of December 31, 2023, there was one Seventh-day Adventist for every 350 people in the world. As recently as the year 2000, the global ratio was 519 people to every member and in 2011 it was 400 to 1.

He asked, How many members are needed to lead one person to baptism?

“This is a key statistic, because it tells us how effective our church is in reaching people,” Trim told Executive Committee members. The answer is 30 if we look at the numbers for 2023. Globally, the church needs 30 members to lead one person to baptism. But this number varies greatly around the globe.

Trim pointed out that the members-to-accessions ratio identifies “unions that face missional challenges, irrespective of the population in a union.” In the West-Central Africa Division, for example, the Northern Ghana Union Conference’s ratio is 24 members for every accession. At the other end of the spectrum, the South-Central Indian Union Section in the Southern Asia Division has a ratio of 231 members for every accession.

These numbers highlight the huge need for “missionaries and resources deployed within divisions but also between divisions, if we are to reach the world with the third angel’s message,” he said.

The original version of this story was posted on the Norwegian Union Conference website.