Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Ruben Pereyra

Second Advisor

Ricardo Norton

Third Advisor

Eduard Schmidt

Abstract

Problem. A 65% of the new Church members in the Argentinian Union Conference (UA) are below 30 years old. However, 35% of them leave the Church annually. This generates the following question: what are the reasons by which such a high%age of young people leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDAC) in the UA?

Methodology. Three surveys were conducted. The first survey was applied to 146 distrital pastors, the second one to 319 young Adventist members, and the third one to 52 apostate young members.

Results. The pastors that answered the first survey recognized that they do not have a permanent retention program. One of the questions that all of them answered satisfactorily was in regards to the number of baptisms they had had in the last three years. They were then asked about the number of seats they had added to their congregations during that same period of time. Their answer was very different. This indicates that there is no net growth when comparing the number of baptisms with the number of seats that should have been added to each church. Among young people that answered the second survey, 65.2% perceived that the goal to increase the number of Church members is greater than caring for the ones that are part of the Church. The last group surveyed indicated that their separation was due to the following facts: 76.9% recognized that they neglect their personal devotional life; 75% expressed there was too much hypocrisy between the members of the church; 48.1% said the Church was unable to fulfill his/her expectations or even solve his/her problems; 46.2% was affected by his/her relations with people outside the church; 42.3% admitted to have had illicit sexual relationships. The conclusion of this study is that the great rate of apostasy in the SDAC in the UA is due to the lack of a permanent program to retain young people in the Church as well as the lack of showing true Christian love among the believers.

Subject Area

Seventh-day Adventist youth--Argentina., Ex-church members--Seventh-day Adventists., Ex-church members--Argentina., Church work with ex-church members--Seventh-day Adventists., Church work with ex-church members--Argentina., Church work with youth--Argentina., Church work with youth--Seventh-day Adventists.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/39/

Download

Share

COinS