Can Seventh-day Adventists Reach the Entire World?
by Raj Attiken | 25 August 2023 |
On November 15, 2022, the World Population Clock recorded that the global population had reached the 8 billion mark. Five months later, India’s population was reported to be 1,425,775,850—surpassing the population of mainland China.
The total population of the two nations—neither of them having but a tiny minority of Christians—is approaching 3 billion. Should this matter to Seventh-day Adventists?
Early Adventists launched a movement that they believed would encompass the whole world. That movement has grown into a church of 22 million members in over 200 countries—a remarkable growth and expansion compared with other faith communities that were born around the same time.
Despite the impressive growth, Adventists represent less than 0.3 percent of the global population. The world population grows by an estimated 200,000 people a day, the membership in the Adventist Church grows by approximately 825 per day, based on the average membership increase in the past five years. The number of Adventist members in India and China is around 2 million, or .07% of their combined population.
Unreached people groups
The concept of “unreached people groups” is sometimes used by mission organizations as they develop strategies for evangelization. A people group, in this context, is the largest group within which the gospel can spread without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance. Unreached groups, by this definition, don’t have enough followers of Christ or resources to evangelize their own people.
There are 2,373 such people groups in India, and 2,135 are unreached, according to the Joshua Project, a research effort that highlights the ethnic people groups of the world with the fewest followers of Christ. China has 545 defined people groups, of which 441 are unreached.
It seems obvious that the statistical odds are stacked heavily against any possibility that Adventists and the Adventist message could be made known to most people on the planet. The enormity of the population numbers just in India and China is cause for skepticism about the potential for success in Christianizing the masses, or even for making everyone aware of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
Several hypotheses have been offered on how the church’s witness could reach all the people living today.
The “we can do it” proposition:
Perhaps the most credulous theory about what Adventists have historically called “finishing the work” proposes that Seventh-day Adventists will take our message to all the inhabitants of our planet before Jesus comes—or, so that Jesus can come.
To that end, the General Conference (GC), in 2015, launched a five-year “Reach the World” campaign, one of many such plans that have been launched over the decades. Since the world hadn’t been reached by 2020, the GC launched the Total Member Involvement strategy, described as “a full-scale, world-church evangelistic thrust that involves every member, every church, every administrative entity, every type of public outreach ministry, personal and institutional outreach.” In the same year, the GC launched the “I Will Go” initiative, with a similar objective.
Despite these initiatives and campaigns, there is no evidence that we are gaining ground on population growth in convincing people to become Adventists.
Some who have conceded to the near impossibility of the task have adopted a default posture claiming that our responsibility is merely to announce the good news through every method available to us. The results are God’s responsibility. This removes some of the dissonance between what we know is the challenge and what we know about the church’s success thus far.
This view says, “It doesn’t matter how successful we are, the important thing is to persevere in our evangelistic activities.” The plan to mail up to one billion copies of The Great Controversy to people who didn’t ask for it has this as an underlying motivation: even if they don’t read the book, at least they will have had the opportunity to be informed. If we mail it to an entire city, we can claim that the city has been warned! The work has been finished in that city!
Yet another nuanced version of this belief is to claim that looking for objective results to our witnessing isn’t useful. We can never know, the argument goes, how many people have embraced the Adventist version of the gospel but have not made a public declaration of their decision. We will not know, until we are ushered into heaven, where people will come to us whom we don’t recall ever meeting and will say, “I am here because of your witness!”
Technology and the gospel commission
With the tremendous technological advances that have been made in the world, doesn’t technology offer us a solution to the challenge of communicating the gospel with the masses? This raises the hope that, perhaps for the first time in history, we are now able to take our Adventist message to every “kindred, tongue, and people” in a very short time.
India had 1.2 billion mobile subscribers at the start of 2023. By the end of 2020, 1.22 billion people subscribed to mobile services in China. Some anticipate that by using communication technology and social media the global population can be introduced to the Adventist church and its message within a relatively short period of time.
Adventists have long held the view that in the final moments of earth’s history before Jesus comes, the seventh-day Sabbath will be the central issue that separates those who are faithful to God and those who are not. Some have clung to the belief that when the whole world’s attention is thus drawn to the Sabbath, people will stream into Adventist churches in droves.
I have heard church members say that the reason we should keep our churches open, even if membership has dwindled to a handful, is that when the Sabbath truth gets national and global attention, people will come looking for Sabbath-keeping Adventists. What would they do if our church buildings and congregations are nowhere to be found?
Another view holds that God will intervene and somehow give every person on the planet the opportunity to know about Jesus. This is frequently described with the biblical metaphor of “the latter rain” of Joel 2:23 and James 5:7. God will do this through one or more miraculous acts that are not dependent on us human agents. God will act in his time. What appears to us to be an impossible task is not impossible for God.
Who gave the Great Commission, and to whom?
There is a segment of Christians that thinks we may have gotten the Great Commission all wrong.
Jesus never used the phrase “Great Commission”—that’s our title for what was said in Matthew 28:16–20. There is even some question, based on the study of Greek textual sources, whether Jesus said all the words of Matthew 28:18-19, or whether they were inserted later, perhaps by as much as 200 years.
Furthermore, if Jesus did speak those words, they were spoken directly to the eleven disciples. Does it not violate the intent of this message to apply the words to our time without also applying to ourselves the other missionary instructions of Jesus?
Don’t take any money with you, nor a traveler’s bag, nor an extra pair of sandals. And don’t stop to greet anyone on the road. . . (Luke 10:2-15).
“Wherever you go,” he said,” stay in the same house until you leave town. But if any place refuses to welcome you or listen to you, shake its dust from your feet as you leave to show that you have abandoned those people to their fate” (Mark 6:10, 1).
There is also the theory that the so-called Great Commission was accomplished in the first century of the Christian era. The Apostle Paul seems to celebrate this accomplishment with declarations such as:
This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives . . . (Col 1:6 NLT).
The Good News has been preached all over the world. . . (Col. 1:23).
The message has gone throughout the earth, and the words to all the world (Romans 10:18 NLT).
When Paul says that the gospel was preached in his lifetime “everywhere,” “all over the world,” and “throughout the earth,” was he telling us that the Great Commission was already fulfilled way back then?
Jesus died for all
A view about world missions that some find compelling is based on the biblical texts that suggest that God’s love is universal and inclusive—even in other cultures and religions:
May you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully (Ephesians 3:18, 19 NLT).
The Word brought light to everyone (John 1:4).
Adam’s sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings . . . new life for everyone (Romans 5:19).
There is one God and Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity – the man Christ Jesus. He gave his life to purchase freedom for everyone (1 Timothy 2:5,6).
You could liken it to a stream which takes on the coloring of the soil over which it flows. God-inspired spirituality, in its flowing through the soils of different cultural and religious outlooks, takes on coloring from them. The multiple worlds of wisdom represented by Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, and the other religions of the world are understood as capturing something of the mystery and radiance of God and refracting it into the lives of their followers. Each world of wisdom is, as it were, the native language of its followers, but combining in a hymn of glory to the Divine.
To those enculturated in the belief that everyone on earth should hear the name of Jesus, such an expansive and generous view of mission would be disconcerting.
The global realities
Regardless of which of these views we might hold, the demographic realities of global population growth present a sobering corrective to any irrational optimism about the mission of the church.
At the least, these realities should nudge us to acknowledge that it is God who invigorates and transforms people’s social, spiritual, and religious allegiances. God will draw all to himself. Regardless of how large or small we are in numbers, we can give public witness to a way of life that expresses love of neighbor, love of planet, and commitment to justice, peace, and equality.
Perhaps the point of Christian mission is that the world needs the goodness of God incarnated in the people who know our good God.
Dr. Raj Attiken is an Adjunct Professor of Religion at Kettering College. He served in the church for forty-two years, for the last sixteen as president of the Ohio Conference. Raj began his pastoral ministry in Sri Lanka, the land of his birth. He and his wife, Chandra, have two adult children and two grandchildren.
