Qualitative church growth

In an age when membership growth in many evangelical Christian denominations has either plateaued or is in decline, the Seventh-day Adventist Church appears to be an outlier, experiencing steady membership growth on many fronts and in diverse contexts. However, a specter hangs over an otherwise glowing picture: the church is hemorrhaging, having lost about 40 percent of its membership between 1965 and 2019.¹

Adventism’s growth

Christianity, from its humble beginnings with 12 disciples, flourished into a major world religion whose center of gravity shifted from Jerusalem to Rome, then from Europe in the West to the Global South. At present, the largest and fastest growth of global Christianity occurs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the Adventist Church, more than 40 percent of its membership is on the continent of Africa.² Two regional headquarters of the church in Africa—the East-Central Africa Division and the Southern Africa–Indian Ocean Division—each have more than 4 million members.

Evangelism versus discipleship

Critical to both quantitative and qualitative growth in the Adventist Church is the debate concerning the primacy of evangelism versus discipleship. Critics of mass baptisms from big, expensive public campaigns suggest that apostasy or high member dropout rates result, in large part, from an emphasis on high accessions (quantity) rather than on the quality of such growth.

Within the past four decades, the Adventist Church has vigorously pursued evangelistic programs producing mass accessions to the faith. One of the earliest was the 1,000 Days of Reaping. It sought to add 1 million persons to the church against the backdrop of an exploding world population.³

Even as the program began, some felt concerned about the quantity-quality issue, which W. B. Quigley acknowledged in an article: “Some may fear that such a plan will provoke cheap decisions based on numerical goals only. This is not what is intended at all.”⁴ The program was a success, with an average of more than 1,100 persons added daily to the Adventist Church for a period of 1,000 days.⁵

“Not only is the church growing, but it is growing at an increasing rate. In 1981,” it expanded “at a rate of 5.66 percent per year. In 1985, the rate was 6.68 percent. In 1900, one out of every 24,390 persons in the world” was an Adventist.⁶ In 2022, the ratio was one out of every 358.⁷

A case for qualitative growth

Certain societies structured according to hierarchical systems, such as in Africa, consider evangelism goals from higher organizations as imperative and mandatory. That can lead to problems as people seek to fulfill them. While I served as a conference secretary, we had a minis­ter who reported baptisms for his station every month. However, when the conference officers eventually paid a visit to his district, the actual membership was a far cry from the reports.

Thankfully, the demand for greater accuracy and more efficient reporting of membership records has begun. As a result, in the past two decades or so, church leadership has emphasized membership audits and introduced computer-
based membership records to many urban churches. Several entities, ranging from local churches to divisions, have dropped a significant number of names from their records in recent years in an attempt to harmonize worship attendance with church records.

In 2011, the Seventh-day Adventist Church commissioned two studies to investigate why a large number of Adventist members were leaving the church.⁸ The comprehensive studies highlighted several critical factors that lead people to drop their church membership. Among the recommendations made at a retention, nurture, and discipleship summit in 2013 were the need for active discipleship programs in every union and training on how to nurture, disciple, retain, and reclaim members. As beneficial as these are, true qualitative growth requires that the Adventist Church carefully consider vital contextual elements within the local social environment.

Indigenization and church growth

Mission historians acknowledge the significant contributions of local evangelists, who helped pre­sent the gospel in contextually appropriate forms during the golden age of the missionary movement.⁹ Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson developed a formula for planting indigenous churches that would be “self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating”—referred to as the three-self formula.¹⁰ Although the three-self principle was an accepted mission strategy during the nineteenth century, it unfortunately was not always practiced. Missionaries often showed reluctance to trust local leaders. Instead, they planted churches that more often reflected their own home bases.¹¹

Since then, missiologists such as Paul Hiebert have stressed the need for a fourth-self principle—self-theologizing, which entails the ability to read and interpret Scripture in the local context.¹² Since the 1970s, the call to go beyond indigenization, or adaptation, to contextualization when presenting the gospel has intensified.¹³ (Contextualization is the need to present the gospel in forms and methods that do not make it appear alien or foreign in local contexts.) However, an often-overlooked dimension of contextualization, especially significant to qualitative church growth, is that of discipleship.¹⁴

An error committed by early Western mis­sionaries that, unfortunately, is being repeated today is developing resources in one context and then applying them to a different one. For example, discipleship resources designed for Western contexts, replete with examples and illustrations only familiar to home audiences, may fail to achieve their objectives when applied to other societies. For discipleship to be effective, factors in the local context and worldview of a people need to be processed to bring about transformation. Otherwise, a reversion to pre-Christian forms and practices could occur during times of crisis.

Contextualized discipleship

In order to obtain qualitative growth, discipleship training needs to be conducted alongside evangelism and should comprise the four following elements:¹⁵

1. Presentation of the supracontextual message of the Bible
2. Identification of the needs and issues existing in the local context
3. Creation of localized discipleship materials
4. Determination of the best pedagogical approach for the individual context

These steps should produce theological and missiological responses to those issues that are unique to specific cultures and worldviews. For example, with animistic worldviews, they should deal with the deeply etched fear of the spirit world and evil and with the social, cultural, and religious pressures that hinder ethical and moral conformity to the image of Christ.

Factors to enhance qualitative growth

Other prerequisite steps for qualitative growth include the following: thorough research, deep reflection, collaboration of grassroots members in developing discipleship programs, and strategic planning and implementation of viable models.

Research. Before adapting the four-step paradigm above, rigorous research is needed to understand the social, cultural, and religious factors that hinder the spiritual vitality of members in their respective contexts. Following this, churches must develop contextual discipleship resources that can respond to such issues as ethnocentrism, corruption, and forms of split-level Christianity¹⁶. Also important is the need to respond to those factors that foster dependence upon un-Christian sources of power for protection, prosperity, promotion, healing, and general well-being.

Reflection. Closely connected to research is the need for reflection. As important as it is to constantly engage the membership in church growth, it is also necessary to examine where the church is or is not growing, why this is so, and to consider what can be done to encourage genuine discipleship or qualitative growth. The book of Acts can help us in this regard. It is worth noting that Acts is not a book on church growth; rather, it demonstrates how the Christian faith “ ‘breaks through barriers that are religious, racial and national.’ ”¹⁷ After his initial focus on the rapid numerical growth of the early church, “Luke lost all interest in church statistics. . . . What he continued to note is the diversity of people who entered the church—all ages, both sexes, Jews and Gentiles, individuals and households, the obscure and the prominent, the range of oc­cupations they represented, the people of character and influence who had entered the new faith. . . . They represented quality as well as quantity.”¹⁸

The book of Acts shows that no specific evangelistic method is responsible for growth, but rather, God is why growth occurs. What was important for Luke was that “the congregations were more heterogeneous than homogenous in membership.” He “was eager to show how the ‘good news of the Kingdom’ surmounted the barriers of religion, race, class, sex, and prejudice in its onward march ‘for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one’ (John 11:52).”¹⁹

Collaboration. Early paradigms of missions largely precluded local leaders and laity from strategizing and planning for effective evangelization. Unfortunately, the same error continues to be made in some places. Evangelistic goals and discipleship programs disconnected from local collaboration can become mere exercises in futility and, therefore, are fated to fail.

Grassroots support provides effective mobilization for mission and facilitates the creation of more relevant and successful discipleship models. Mission scholars are to be encouraged to develop local contextual models for disciple-making rather than depending on a one-size-fits-all model. Methods such as storytelling and using local proverbs, dramas, and songs could supplement the purely philosophical, propositional pedagogical methods currently employed.²⁰

Strategic planning. The explosive growth of the Adventist Church largely by public evangelistic campaigns, when closely examined, reveals certain gaps and issues. For instance, only a few people groups compose the majority of the church while a significant number of other groups are marginalized and constitute unentered ter­ritories. In some urban areas, the church is struggling to have a significant presence, and certain societal classes appear neglected or unreached.

The qualitative growth of the Adventist Church ought to be heterogeneous, inclusive, and pervasive. For this to occur, leaders need to map their respective territories, identify both entered and unentered people groups within each local ter­ritory, and then prayerfully develop comprehensive strategies to incarnate the gospel among the various unentered territories. Qualitative growth requires more than merely baptizing and establishing church congregations; it requires implementing contextualized disciple-making programs right from the beginning.

Conclusion

The Seventh-day Adventist Church can be very proud of its growth. However, the global church could benefit even more from such quantitative growth. Among the benefits that can be derived from true qualitative growth are tremendous stewardship growth, resulting in increased per capita giving; a mature and robust mis­sionary force to assist in global leadership and penetrating closed regions of the world; and a manifestation of what a truly united community of saints looks like to a fragmented, hostile, and disenchanted world. Both the Adventist Church and global Christianity could greatly benefit from the qualitative growth of a youthful, energetic, and enterprising church.