Our Church’s Return to Centralized Authority
by Alvin Masarira | 18 October 2024 |
The General Conference Executive Committee (GC Excom) met this year from October 10 to 16.
The GC Excom is one of the most influential bodies of the worldwide church and it meets more frequently—at least twice a year, so 10 times in five years—than the General Conference Constituency Session, which meets only once every five years.
The GC Excom has about 300 members from all world divisions and some church institutions. It has the authority equivalent to a General Conference (GC) Session—it is a session between sessions. The GC Excom has, in 1999, elected a new General Conference President (Jan Paulsen) and, in 1976, voted that women can be elected and ordained as elders in the local churches.
The GC Excom meeting in the year preceding a full General Conference Session finalizes the General Conference Session Agenda. Unless something major comes up in the next nine months, nothing which has not been discussed at the Annual Council will be dealt with by the delegates representing the 22+ million world members at the 62nd GC Session that will be held in St. Louis, Missouri, from July 3-12, 2025.
In contrast to the 61st GC Session held in 2022 for just six days in a hybrid setting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the GC Session 2025 will return to a fully on-site event for a full ten days. As always, the delegates will meet to discuss the business of the church and elect its leadership. On the two Sabbaths, July 5 and July 12, almost 50,000 guests and visitors will descend on the America’s Center Convention Complex in St. Louis for Sabbath worship, which will demonstrate the diversity of the global church. The theme for the Session is “Jesus Is Coming, I Will Go!”
I am sure there are as many views as there are church members about the benefits of a General Conference session. One of the main arguments made for this massive gathering is that it is a visible demonstration of the world-wide nature of the Adventist Church, and the global unity of the believers. The mission is global, and the GC Session is a demonstration of this mandate.
Church growth
Although it is common in some organizations to delegate authority to committees—which are, of course, smaller than the constituency they serve—over the years, the Adventist Church has been moving more and more towards centralization of authority.
We have grown from a group of about 3,000 at our formation in 1863 to over 22 million today, and from a church based in the United States in the late 19th century to a worldwide organization. In our early years the organizational authority was centralized at the GC headquarters, which served the purpose, given the limited geography and membership.
As the church grew around the world, the diversity in needs due to culture and context of the societies the church was operating in, as well as the sheer size of the world territory that needed to be managed, finally made it necessary to decentralize the governance structure.
Decentralization
At the General Conference Sessions of 1901 and 1903 two critical changes were implemented.
The first was the centralization of authority in the General Conference when various semi-independent ministries of the church became departments of the General Conference and local conferences. The GC ExCom would provide leadership and management oversight for all of these ministries within a given region.
The second was the counterbalancing of this centralized authority, through the creation of union conferences with their own semi-independent boards and constituencies. All the union conferences together would form the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. The union conferences were given some autonomy to make some decisions within the parameters and framework of Adventist faith, belief, and practice.
Centralization again
This decentralisation, however, has continued to be a source of tension, as evidenced by disagreements which come up between the regional structures, such as the union conferences and the General Conference. So over the years the GC ExCom has been clawing back much of that authority that was diffused through the creation of union conferences back in the early part of the 20th century.
Take the creation of divisions of the General Conference—the first ones being North America, Europe, and Asia in 1913. There are now 13 world divisions. Although these division offices are located all over the world, they are in fact the General Conference headquarters in that territory.
A cursory look at church working policy, as well as the Church Manual, reveals three main things in this regard.
- These documents have become longer, implying that they now contain more specific details and areas that need to be prescribed
- More and more GC session delegates are directly connected to the GC or its divisions and their entities
- The primary evidence of the GC’s clawing back some of the authority it “lost” during the 1901/03 organisational restructuring is the increasing number of decisions that now require higher organization approval.
Modified policies
One has to look carefully to see how the decision-making processes have evolved.
The GC ExCom has over time modified the working policy and the Church Manual so that whatever issues the leadership believes are important (however “important” is defined) are shifted to the higher organization for approval.
For example, decisions that were assumed to be solely under the purview of congregations are beginning to require local conference approval. Similarly, the Divisions of the General Conference are given greater say on issues that the 1901/03 organisational restructuring placed under union conferences.
Giving the GC ExCom more control may have begun in the 1950s after the publication of the book Questions on Doctrine, which some believe marked the genesis of liberal views within the church. Prior to that, they say, the church was dogmatic about its unique status and had no problem with its being viewed as a cult by other Protestant churches. The 1950s marked the time when Adventism began to look for common ground with other denominations, the result being “creeping compromises” on what used to be considered fundamental Adventist positions.
Around that time, the GC ExCom again began to demand a bigger role. For example:
Concerned that the writings of Ellen White no longer have the authority they used to led to the creation of a local church department called “Spirit of Prophecy Writings Coordinator” at the GC Session in 2022.
Of course, the issue of whether women can be ordained to pastoral ministry has occupied the attention of the church. Although the Working Policy specifically states that union conferences decide who can be ordained, and the requirements for ordination aren’t gender-specific, the General Conference found a way of having a say on that decision.
A change which might appear insignificant until there are contentious issues has to do with church membership. It has long been understood that the local church determines who is a member and who isn’t, based on Adventist parameters, and simply sends records of membership to the conference. However an amendment made to the Church Manual at the 2022 GC Session labeled “Redemptive Membership Audit” empowers the higher organisation to audit local church membership records. And we all know whose views carry the day if there is a disagreement between the auditor and the membership being audited.
Since the GC ExCom determines which items end up on the Session agenda, this would suggest that there should be a call for agenda items from the global church. But there hasn’t been any deliberate attempt to implement a process for local churches to submit issues they feel should be on the GC Session agenda.
By simply not talking about the process, the GC has taken it upon themselves to be the ones who decide what issues are important enough to be on the General Conference Session agenda.
A trivial matter?
These might appear to be trivial matters, but they militate against openness, transparency, and wider participation. Unless there are General Conference Session delegates who are brave enough to raise new issues or amendments from the General Conference Session floor (which rarely happens), only matters approved by the GC Excom will appear on the agenda and be discussed.
Even issues that appear clear in policy are sometimes summarily changed under the pretext of “oversight.” For example, the General Conference Model Constitution permits local conferences to decide how long the term of office of its leadership should be—as long as it does not exceed 5 years. However, some divisions—the Southern Africa-Indian Ocean Division, for example—do not allow the conferences to exercise that right, but require them to seek approval by the division executive committee.
Another recent example is the pulpit ban issued by the Michigan Conference on the president of Adventist Frontier Missions. Whether one agrees with the views he expressed or not, there is a conversation to be had about whether a conference administration can instruct a local church to not allow in the pulpit a church member who is not under discipline, and therefore in good standing—even in the church where he holds membership.
The tension between the central office and the regions will continue to bedevil the church until an amicable solution is found.
Rigidity is counterproductive
It is counterproductive to impose unity by means of policies, rules, and regulations. Unity is first a spiritual unity of common mission and belief, not just a visible unity within an organizational structure.
Loosening these ties would require wisdom, trust, and generosity. But it would actually strengthen the church. We can remain within one worldwide structure only if policies vary from one geographical territory and culture to another. The model of the General Conference would best be served by a federation of semi-independent union conferences able to apply rules and policies within their context.
What should unite the worldwide church would be the mission to special message we have for the world living through its end times. How this is done and by whom should be left to local entities to decide.
Alvin Masarira is originally from Zimbabwe. He is a structural engineering consultant based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He and his wife, Limakatso, a medical doctor, have three children.