Good News for Endangered Adventists

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Good News for Endangered Adventists

The Adventist Review recently published  Endangered Adventism, painting a very bleak outlook for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America.

According to research by Dr. David Trim and the office of Archives, Statistics & Research (ASTR) at the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the median age of an Adventist around the world is 32. In the U.S and Canada, that number is 51.

18.46%. That’s the percentage of Adventist members in North America that are under the age of 40. The percentage under the age of 25—4.55%.

There is no doubt that there is serious competition for the hearts and minds of young people in North America, but are they truly that close to disappearing from our churches?

Exactly where did these numbers come from?

GC Survey

In 2013, the General Conference conducted an online survey of the North American Division. Email invitations were sent to a selection of churches and 300 of them signed up to participate. 12% of the members in these churches actually filled out the survey – 1,495 people. The report indicates that this is a fairly typical response for online surveys. Of these 1,495 people, 4.55% were 25 or younger and 18.46% were 40 or younger.

It’s clear that this survey was carefully prepared by a meticulous team. The question is, are these 1,495 members a representative sample of 1 million+ members in North America? Is this the best data we have?

eAdventist

eAdventist is North America’s membership records and currently contains over 1.15 million members. More than 780,000 of these members have provided their birth dates.

sample_sizes

1,495 vs 780,00

members_by_10s

2016 members by 10-year groups (eAdventist)

Query those 780,000 people like it’s 2013 and a very different picture emerges.

Median age of members = 46
Members 25 and under = 16.8%
Members 40 and under = 40.0%

If you exclude people under 10, the median age of the United States (2010 Census) is 42 and Canada (2011 Census) is about 44. Even more encouraging, the median age of members joining by baptism or profession of faith in the last 8 years is 32.

baptisms_since_2008

Baptisms by age (eAdventist)

Most young adults are making major life changes – launching careers, deciding on relationships or marriage and evaluating their commitment to God and church. Let’s encourage and welcome them whether they attend regularly or occasionally. Thankfully, it appears that the reports of their extinction “have been greatly exaggerated“.

Metropolitan Adventists

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Metropolitan Adventists

Jesus told his followers that they were “the salt of the earth” (Matt 5:13). With over 80% of the population of the United States and Canada now living in “urban” areas, how much salt do Seventh-day Adventists contribute to North America’s largest metropolitan areas today?

The US Census Bureau uses “metropolitan statistical areas” (MSA) and Stats Can uses “census metropolitan areas” (CMA) so we compared the populations (2015 US Census, 2011 Canada Census) to current membership of churches (eAdventist) in each of these areas. The 5 largest metro areas looked like this:

largestmetroareas

 Total Population (blue), Members (green)

Clearly, a little salt is having to go a long way in these large cities. To get a better comparison, we magnified the members by a factor of 100 and used stacked bars. Note that the population totals are still correct but the “population” (blue) is reduced by magnifying the “members” (green).

largestmetroareas_x_100

Members x 100 (green)

It’s safe to say that there is no shortage of opportunity for the “salt” in these areas. The metro areas with the highest ratio of members have Adventist hospitals, headquarters offices or both.

mostpresence_x_100

Members x 100 (green)

Predictably, the metro areas with the lowest ratio of members do not have hospitals, schools or headquarters offices in them. This provides them with a fantastic opportunity and challenge.

mostopportunity_x_100

Members x 100 (green)

Here is an Excel spreadsheet (nad-metro-areas) of the 38 largest areas in North America, including population and members. Contact us at help@eadventist.net if you would need more of this kind of information for church planting or metro outreach.

Transfer Comments

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Transfer Comments

eAdventist makes most membership transfers easy by connecting church clerks and eliminating “snail” mail. However, some transfers aren’t “business as usual” and require a conversation:

  • “Did you mean Maxwell Sr or Maxwell Jr?”
  • “Sorry, Ayeisha transferred to Rock Solid Church last year”
  • “Any update on the status of this transfer?”

“Online” clerks have always been able to contact each other by email, but Transfer Comments make these conversations even easier to start and follow.

addcomment

As soon as you click “Save”, eAdventist will email the comment to each of the “online” clerks involved in the transfer. For any “offline” church, the email will go to the conference clerk. The “Email” tab lets you check the delivery status of these messages.

Transfers that have comments are easy to spot on the Transfers page. Just look for the “comment” icon.

commenticon

PRO TIPS

  • Sort all transfers that have Comments to the top by clicking on the “comment” column heading.

sortcomments

  • Sort all transfers that have green “lights” to the top by clicking on the “lights” column heading.

sortlights

 

Attach a File

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Attach a File

eAdventist’s Mailing Lists are a powerful way to stay in touch with members in your church or conference. Now you can include file attachments in your messages – the agenda for your next board meeting, PDF announcing an upcoming event, registration forms, reports, photo images, and more. Just be sure that any file you want to send is under 9MB.

Here’s how it works. Create your message, then click on the “paperclip” icon and choose a file to attach. That’s it!

messageattachment

Here’s what it looks like in action!

messageattachment

Oh, and one more thing. If you’d like to see what you’re about to send to your entire list, you can now send a test message to yourself before clicking “Send” to everybody.

testemail

Extra power and insurance for your Mailing List.

Officer Labels update

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Envelopes

Officer Labels is powerful tool for communicating with your organization’s officers. Based on your feedback, it now handles two challenging situations even better:

Officer has been “dropped”

If the listed officer has been dropped (deceased, missing, removed, duplicate), the Officer Labels screen displays their status in red. However, the officer was still included in the mailing labels with the officer’s name and address. Now, this label will be an “Anonymous” label with the office title and the church’s address.

Treasurer
Rock Solid SDA Church
123 Granite St
Bedrock WA 98123

Officer’s address is empty or stopped

Until now, Officer Labels provided to option to exclude these labels or include them – with the officer’s name and empty/stopped address. Now, these labels will be “Anonymous” to ensure that the church is not left out of the mailing.

For more information on Officer Labels, check out this article in our knowledge base.

Even If Your Name is…

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hello-my-name-is

Some of us inherit names that are a little “more” than we want for everyday use. We’ve just added the Legal name field to eAdventist so that you can record these names for your members and use First name for their “everyday” name. Here is what the Person screen looks like now.

person_show

person_edit

Person Search helps you find these members of this by searching both “First name” and “Legal name”.

person_search

You’re welcome, Fredegar.

Tagging just got easier

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tags

Tags give you a flexible way to identify groups of people in your church or conference. However, tagging people in eAdventist to create those groups has been a bit tedious. You could only tag one … person … at … a … time. The waiting is over and you can now add people to tags (and committees) so easily you’ll probably want to do it just for fun.

On Person Search and Advanced Search, the results list has checkboxes beside the names. As soon as you check one of them (1), a tool bar will appear (2) with the option to choose a tag or committee for the selected people.

Person Search

Choose a tag …

Select a tag

… and it’s done. eAdventist lets you know what happened with each selected person. Green = “added”. Yellow = “already added before”. Red = “couldn’t add”. Hover over any of the indicators to see an explanation.

Tagging results