David Trim

The 8th Annual Adventist Archives Lectureship will take place on October 22, 2026 on the campus of Washington Adventist University. This year's lecture, “Bonds of Love: Adoption and Missionary Families”, will be presented by Seventh-day Adventist historian and professor at Southern Adventist University, Dr. Lisa Clark Diller. The Adventist Archives Lectureship is co-hosted by the Washington Adventist University Honors College and the General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. Learn more at bit.ly/4c4qJGG.

To get directly to the presentations from #GCAC26, Powerpoint: hope-documents.fra1.digitalo… Text: hope-documents.fra1.digitalo…

"This is how many accessions each local congregation produces on average in the world Church. This graph shows the figures for the last 25 years, and we can see that while the ratio was stagnant throughout the late 2000s and the 2010s, a high point was reached in 2024. But with the decline in accessions last year, the accessions per congregation ratio also fell in 2025. We hope that, if the figure is not higher for 2026, it will reach a new high in 2027 as we see the results of the Church working in an integrated way with OneVoice27 and All Things New." #GCAC26

"This graph, which shows the last decade, reveals that there is some volatility in the growth rate, whereas we would ideally hope, as mentioned earlier, that, as the world Church grows larger, growth would also steadily increase. Yet, again, growth is the product of both losses and accessions, and the Church’s greater emphasis on redemptive membership reviews in recent years has affected the growth rate." #GCAC26

"As the next slide shows, the world church in 2025 achieved an average of 4,000 accessions every day. Around the world, someone became a Seventh-day Adventist every 21.6 seconds." #GCAC26

"This next slide shows the population-to-member ratio in the world – the number of people for every Seventh-day Adventist. As membership grows, the population-to-member ratio gets lower, and therefore, in the case of this graph, the lower the number the better. Throughout our history, the ratio has dropped, and, as of December 31, 2025, there were 332 people to every Seventh-day Adventist." #GCAC26

"This slide compares total gains and losses in the past quinquennium, and you can see how losses literally undercut the accessions. The world Church rightly continues to address the challenge of high losses, but it is a challenge not only to the leaders gathered in this Council, but also to every church member – to every disciple of Jesus – to be their brother’s keeper, and their sister’s, too." #GCAC26

Of those 48,431,544 people, "at least 20.95 million have chosen to leave. This means that our net loss rate is slowly rising and is now 43.26%." #GCAC26