Exposing Adventism - Adventism's Revolving Door

It seems that members are exiting the Seventh-day Adventist Church almost as fast as they join. There is an interesting article discussing this dilemma at http://www.plusline.org/article.php?id=2899

Conventional evangelism does not seem to work very well any more in the large cities. Even African American pastors who have long had great success with tent meetings in the inner city each summer are reporting a decrease in converts and turning to new approaches. Adventists are baptizing very few people outside the immigrant communities that come from places in the world where church growth is exploding: Latin America, the Caribbean, parts of Africa, Korea and the Philippines. Research shows that in these fast-growing immigrant churches, the "second generation," raised and educated in America, has a dropout rate of 75% to 90% or more. (Monte Sahlin, Passport, Summer 2001, a ministry newsletter for the Pacific Union Conference)

A dropout rate of 75% to 90%? That means a retention rate of 10% to 25% -- and that from Adventism's "fast-growing" low income immigrant communities. That means that for every 1 million new members, which are presumably baptisms, that there are 750,000 to 900,000 members leaving Adventism. This amounts to a 375 to 450 per cent turnover every five years!

Seventh-day Adventism renowned for having a very big back door. The churning of people through the Seventh-day Adventist sect is not something they talk about. It's never the fault of Adventism.

Perhaps a good label for this would be "Seventh-day Adventism -- the church with no answers."