St. Louis GC Session 2025, Day 1½: the Secretariat, and More
by Loren Seibold | 4 July 2025 |
Happy Independence Day, Americans!
We kicked off the morning with the anti-vaxxers trying to bring up the same stuff they lost on yesterday. This was a result of Elder Wilson’s backpedaling on what he said yesterday. Indeed, he was correct in—but he was also wrong, because what he discovered (overnight, apparently) was that a quite different statement—a preliminary one, or a first draft, or something—had been posted ten years ago, and no one noticed it in spite of all the noise made by those highly concerned about vaccines and that anyone would dare think that science was more important than the Bible!
(Again, I think science trumps the Bible in things having to do with, well, science. I’ll take a doctor with a drug over casting the demons out of me any day. But that’s just me.)
A woman named Sharyn Hole from down-undah was at the micro-phone again, several times, to try to get her motion through that the whole meeting get sidetracked into talking about the General Conference (GC) and vaccinations and the United Nations. There is a conspiracy note to this: I think they imagine that the GC is more powerful than it is. They’re the ones who figured out what these guys in Silver Spring are hiding.
In any case, today’s attempt to push vaccines into the agenda failed again, by a fairly substantial margin.
I told you yesterday that in these meetings, reports are considered “business.” Today’s report was from the “secretariat.” (You know my age when I tell you I keep thinking of a racehorse every time they use the word). Erton Köhler gave the report. He said his job was administrative (all the “technical aspects” of running the GC), executive (he’s the boss of a whole bunch of people), and mission (strategic planning.) He made a particular point about strategizing mission outreach to non-entered and low-entered areas of the world.
I confess, I get lost in all the program titles and mission mottos. Suffice it to say that it sounds like they’re doing everything, everywhere, all at once.
Global statistics
I’m a David Trim fan all the way. David is the Director of Archives, Statistics, and Research, and generally the smartest guy in the room. David’s report never disappoints, and again, it was the highlight of the morning: a nice blend of encouragement and honesty. You might want to go through it, but here’s the headline: the church is growing—but the church is losing people pretty fast, too. David’s got the membership pegged at 23,684,200, give or take.
However, the net loss rate—that is subtracting our losses from our gains—is 43.17%.
Read that again. We lose 43.17% of our members.
But as I said, you need to watch it for yourself.
To me, that statistic casts a bit of a shadow on all the rest of the boasting about everything that’s being done by the GC. Okay, so I know that better evangelism is happening places other than where I live. It’s true: we here in the global west are cynical and we’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for organized religion generally—the high-pressure evangelistic kind of religion that the GC promotes particularly. But I’ve been around reports too much—and made them myself—to believe that everything is as amazing as it sounds.
I’m not saying they’re not telling the truth—but I know how my church thinks of things. They think success consists in hiring a bunch of people and give them “director of” titles, writing some slogans and designing some logos, and we all assume it’s a going concern. But let’s see the results. Not just in the short term (I’m thinking of David Trim’s net loss rate here) but in a much longer term.
Was it Ronald Reagan who said “Trust but verify”? There are indeed some big success stories out there—Papua New Guinea last year comes to mind—but there’s more to success than mottos and offices and directors.
For my part, I give the credit for Papua New Guinea’s evangelistic success to people other than Erton Köhler. I suspect he had fairly little to do with it.
Break for lunch—which I generally skip in order to write to you, dear AT readers.
Loren Seibold is the executive editor of Adventist Today.
