Opinion Column Questions Size of Adventist Church Administration, Citing 2015 Savings Study

An opinion column by a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, published on the Adventist Today website and dated 28 July 2023, questions whether the church’s administrative structure has grown too large. The author writes that the church began as a movement with a strong dislike of hierarchy, yet now has four levels of offices above the local church, with hundreds of presidents and vice-presidents.

According to the column, an independent study was initiated in 2015 by the Executive Committee of the North American Division. Its results, presented at the Division’s Annual Meeting, estimated that savings of $145,000,000 could be achieved if the conference offices in the North American Division were removed and pastors, schools and communities were managed from the Union level. The report also proposed less far-reaching options, including merging local conferences, which would save less money. The author notes that one passage gives the restructuring figure as $145,000 a year, while the study figure given elsewhere in the column is $145 million. Stewardship of funds given by church members carries weight in the author’s argument, which draws on the principle that much entrusted brings accountability (Luke 12:48).

The author says he has served for six years as pastor of four churches in Appalachia, where members give small sums but the congregations often lack enough money to pay their utility bills. He argues that church leaders have become accustomed to large figures and may have lost sight of how much of that money comes from ordinary donors.

The column describes the Union level of church administration in detail. According to the author, Unions oversee education, hold conventions, monitor conference activity, manage colleges and transfer tithes and offerings from conferences to the Division. He writes that in the 1990s, while he was working in the Pacific Union, a study commissioned there concluded that local conferences could run camps and schools without the Union level. He notes that the Pacific Union still exists. The author also writes that Ellen White had supported the creation of Unions as a safeguard against General Conference leaders who, in his account, were insensitive to regional cultural differences, and that some North American Union presidents used that authority to resist pressure from General Conference administrators on women’s leadership.

The author states that no significant streamlining has followed the 2015 report. He says the North American Division moved into its own building, which he describes as a matter of separation of powers, and that the administrative sector has not shrunk. He questions whether the church needs such a large bureaucracy, acknowledging that staff in conferences, Unions, Divisions and the General Conference office are busy but arguing that much of that work duplicates existing resources and is hard to apply in local fields. He also reports that conference presidents told him they spend much of their time travelling to meetings and committees. He observes that institutions and communities in the North American Division are declining while the administration has not been reduced.

Drawing on his own experience, the author describes his conference in Ohio, where he has worked for 20 years. He says that a few years ago the conference was forced to close Mount Vernon Academy, its oldest secondary school. He writes that although the territory includes some of the most densely populated regions of the United States, most of its communities are small, church members are ageing and membership is falling. He says that his own pastoral area now covers 500 square miles, with communities 100 miles apart.

Source: Read the original report (translated from Russian)