A Meaningful Voice?

How do we—the local church membership—help make ideas and goals come to fruition beyond our own congregation? Are we left at the mercy of our administrators, or do we carry a meaningful influence and voice as well?

To answer this question, let’s first look at how our Church is structured. 

Because we live in a world full of top-down hierarchies—from company CEOs and presidents to religious authorities like the Pope—our understanding of leadership in the Adventist Church is often skewed to understand our Church as a similar top-down model. But as George Knight, a prolific author and former professor at the Theological Seminary at Andrews University, explained during a 2020 interview I conducted for the podcast series How the Church Works, “We do not have a presidential system ... but more and more, we act as if it is. And therefore, whether it’s the local conference, the union conference or the General Conference, we have a temptation to make it into a presidential system where the president sets the agenda.”

The Adventist Church structure can most accurately be described as interlocking and interdependent. 

The local church is the foundation of the Adventist Church. It is where membership is held, where members vote on church business and leadership and where baptism and membership matters are decided. Next is the local conference, made up of groups of churches within a defined territory, usually a state or region. A group of conferences makes up a union, which supports the conferences in their territory and oversees Adventist universities and other special entities. The final layer is the General Conference, the Adventist Church’s global leadership body. It is split into 13 divisions that oversee different parts of the world. The divisions aren’t technically their own layer but are a working part of the General Conference.

The General Conference Session, like the one that took place in St. Louis last summer, is a decision-making event occurring every five years. This is when important decisions are made that affect the global Church. Likewise, a constituency session, such as the one being held for the Southwestern Union, makes decisions that affect the membership within a conference or union’s territory.

“If you understand how things are at the local church level, it’s almost identical at every other level of the Church,” said G. Alex Bryant, North American Division (NAD) president. For example, we use a nominating committee process to elect a local church deacon, a local church usher and a local church youth leader. We use the exact same nominating committee process to elect the General Conference president and all positions in between.”

Committees and constituency sessions allow for a certain amount of accountability and democracy that a top-down system wouldn’t.

So, how can the average member participate in creating change in a large global Church?

According to Bryant, change starts at your local church. “What I encourage young people to do is to try to get involved,” he said. “When you get to the division level, there are 1.2 million people in the North American Division. So you’re one of 1.2 million, and the chances of getting involved in the vision and process are less likely. … At your local church level, you may be one person among 200 or 300 people, but the process is the same, and it’s a great learning opportunity on how the Church operates. Once you get that experience, or you sit on that board with a pastor or local conference president, they may be looking for someone—because people are saying, ‘We need to get young people involved,’ at every level of the Church! So the easiest place to get involved is the place that’s closest to you, whether it’s at the local church or the local conference.”

In addition to getting involved at the local level, each of us can have a  voice by connecting with our elected delegates at the conference, union and division levels. Build relationships and participate in conversations to help those representatives make decisions.

Our model of governance offers a level of resistance to autocratic and erratic leaders that might, in another model, be able to take the Adventist Church in their own direction. Changes to Church policy can only be made through constituency sessions at the appropriate organizational level, a process designed to protect the Church from hasty decisions that could cause lasting harm.

Though the process is slow, even the policies that shape Church organizations can be changed through our voting process if given enough time and interest. Kyoshin Ahn, NAD undersecretary, explained a little about how policy works to benefit us. “A recommendation for a new policy or the revision of an existing policy comes to us from every direction,” said Ahn. “It comes from local conferences or unions or various denominational entities. The reason I’m saying that, is that policy is dynamic. It is not fixed, although it is fixed in writing—it is dynamic and can be amended.”

Today, with more people operating across the globe, the Adventist Church’s decisions must be made with increasing care for the massive spectrum of humanity they serve.
Policies, leadership and decision-making bodies are a vital part of that process, and they remain an important way a local church member can participate in shaping the Seventh-day Adventist Church for future generations. a

By Kaleb Eisele. Eisele is digital content specialist for the Oregon Conference. A full version of this article appeared in the North Pacific Union Gleaner, and was originally adapted from episode 3 of How the Church Works, a podcast written and produced by Heather Moor, Nina Vallado and Kaleb Eisele, and sponsored by the Adventist Learning Community. To listen to the full episode, hear interviews with the administrators quoted in this article or learn more about the podcast, visit HowTheChurchWorks.com.