Seventh-day Adventist Church Reports 1.465 Million New Members in 2023

The Seventh-day Adventist Church recorded 1.465 million new members in 2023, according to the Annual Statistical Report presented by David Trim, director of the General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, at the church’s Annual Council on October 13. Trim said that “2023 saw the highest number of net accessions of any year in church history, exceeding the 1.383 million added in 2018.” He added that the number of accessions is back at the level seen before the challenging years of 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trim also reported that membership growth depends on both new members and departures. In 2023, 836,905 people who were alive and well chose to leave the church. That was the third-highest year for net losses, after 2019, when statistics show 1,107,514 people left.

Presenting membership data for the 59 years since 1965, Trim said the church has accepted 45,117,980 people into membership in that period, while 19,392,486 have chosen to leave. “More than four of every ten church members are slipping away,” Trim said, urging General Conference Executive Committee members and church members to “be their brother’s keeper, and their sister’s too.”

Trim said the church’s growth should also be compared with world population growth. “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,” he said.

According to Trim, there was one Seventh-day Adventist for every 350 people in the world as of December 31, 2023. He noted that the global ratio was 519 people to one member in 2000 and 400 to one in 2011. Trim told Executive Committee members that the church needs 30 members to lead one person to baptism, calling this “a key statistic” for measuring how effectively the church reaches people. He added that the ratio varies widely by region.

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, the Northern Ghana Union Conference has a ratio of 24 members for every accession. The South-Central Indian Union Section in the Southern Asia Division has a ratio of 231 members for every accession.

Trim said these figures point to a 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.”

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