Adventist Church Member Beliefs About Creation, Care, and Divine Revelation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-7-2024

Abstract

he Seventh-day Adventist Church holds a belief (Adventist Fundamental Belief #6) in a “recent six-day creation” during which God created the world. This belief explicitly includes the expectation of creation care. While we have limited data on what Adventist church members around the world believe about creation care, we do have consistent data on how creation beliefs intersect with other beliefs about careand the Bible. Creation care is inseparable from care for self and other people (Duong & Pensini, 2023; Schultz, 2001). Indeed, relating to nature is a basic human psychological need (Baxter & Pelletier, 2019), along with wholehearted action, competence, and belonging. Thus, we should expect that strong belief increation parallels strong beliefs in prosocial action and care for the self. Likewise, because belief in 11 creation is tied to belief in God’s revelation through the Bible (Whitney, 2020), we might also expect beliefs about Biblical revelation to be associated with beliefs about creation. The data in this report comes from three waves of the Global Church Member Survey (2013-2023; GCMS)commissioned by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists to study the beliefs, behaviors, and experiences of Adventist church members. Over 24,000 cases were included in Wave I, over 65,000 in Wave II, and over 149,000 in Wave III. In the three waves of the GCMS and a recent study of North American Millennial Adventists (Jacobs et al., 2019; N = 1153), at least four-fifths of each sample stronglyagreed with a broad belief in creation (e.g. “God created the world”) and at least 95% agreed overall. However, in all four samples, fewer respondents strongly agreed with a more specific statement that paralleled the Adventist Fundamental Belief (“…in six days of 24 hours/six literal days/exactly 24-hour days in the relatively recent past”). The decline in strong agreement ranged from 15% to 19% in the GCMSwaves and approached 30% among Adventist Millennials (Jacobs, 2019). Overall agreement also fell below 90%

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