Seventh-day Adventist pastors around the world are considered frontline workers in promoting the church’s mission—caring for local congregations and leading out in community outreach. Today there are an estimated 14,000 ordained Adventist pastors working in more than 180 countries.

But according to Jim Cress, ministerial association secretary for the world church, some regions of the international Adventist Church are looking to the future and predicting a coming shortage of pastors.

The areas facing the biggest and most immediate challenges are on the African continent, says Cress. Church sources estimate Adventist membership in Africa, currently just over 4 million, will reach 14 million by 2015. Cress says the church is nowhere close to turning out the amount of pastors it needs on an annual basis, even right now. He calls theological education in Africa “probably one of our biggest crisis needs.”

In Australia, church leaders projected last December that there will be a shortage of some 50 pastors within the next five years. Anthony Kent, secretary of the South Pacific ministerial association, says the church will have to look more to its members to act as ministers, or recruit ministers from overseas, if it cannot contain its losses.

“The church relies heavily on its members for financing and fulfilling its ministry,” he said last year. “However, the church also needs ministers trained to coordinate, direct, lead, and support. A skilled minister and a motivated local church is a powerful combination. The success of this combination means so much to the success of Adventism.”

This situation is mirrored in North America, says Dave Osborne, ministerial secretary for the church in the region. “I think we need to get going on this because it’s a crisis that’s absolutely looming in our church,” says Osborne. “In a few years we’re going to be retiring a whole cadre of pastors and we don’t have a whole cadre of pastors coming on board.”

“We’re not producing [enough of] them out of our schools,” he says. Many independent ministries are producing what Osborne calls quasi pastors—pastors who have not studied theology at a graduate level at an Adventist seminary. “They’re going to flood us,” he says.

According to Cress, the church in North America has traditionally gone through a “feast or famine” cycle. “The word gets out that there are too many theology majors and by the time that filters down and young people don’t sign up for theology, we’re at the point of needing them again. That’s been happening in North America since at least the 1960s. We go through cycles where it seems we have too many, then we go through cycles where we have too few.”

In contrast, other regions of the world church are facing the problem of finding positions for an excess of theology graduates. There are no fears of pastoral shortages in some major areas of the Southern Asia-Pacific region, says Cress. “Specifically in the Philippines they’re turning out people who can’t even get jobs. We’ve got almost a glut of pastors there—an overabundance.”

John Duroe, ministerial secretary for the church in the Southern Asia-Pacific, confirms this situation. “We have four colleges turning out about 200 ministerial graduates, but the conferences cannot afford to hire many of them,” he says. “This could be a deterrent for young people entering the ministry.”

Cress estimates the church in Inter-America and South America is turning out enough pastoral candidates to keep up with demand. Alejandro Bullon, ministerial association secretary for the church in South America, says there are 3,500 ministers for 1,600,000 members. “Each year the schools here graduate about 250 new ministers,” says Bullon.

Cress says that examination and planning is needed in those areas of the world where supply of pastors is outstripped by demand. “Strong, effective church leadership is vital as the church moves toward the challenges of this new century; and this is especially true at the local congregation level,” he says.

Next week: Adventist leaders talk about possible reasons for the shortfall of pastors, and ways in which this challenge can be addressed.