Many churches receive immigrants who are already Adventist
Like many other members of his church, Michael Mbui came to England from Kenya to attend school. Today, 15 years later, he pastors four small Seventh-day Adventist congregations with members who, like him, immigrated to England searching for a better life.
“Without immigrants the Adventist church in England would be reduced significantly,” says Aris Vontzalidis, director of Church Growth in South England. “Now that immigrants have come in, [our] churches have been given life again.”
More than 80 percent of the Adventist Church’s membership in England comes from other countries, according to Vontzalidis, who himself is originally from Greece.
Though much of the immigration impacting the church in England started as early as the 1950s, a new wave of immigrants, mostly from Africa, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, continues to swell the Adventist Church’s ranks in the face of dwindling growth among native members.
But England is not the only country where Adventist churches are seeing a changing membership.
“It’s everywhere,” says Bruce Moyer, who retired in 2003 as an associate director of the Institute of World Mission at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University in Michigan, United States.
“We’re in the midst of the largest mass migration in human history, literally, and it doesn’t show any signs of letting up,” Moyer says.
In 2000, there were 175 million international migrants in the world, or about one out of every 35 persons, Moyer told attendees of a recent Adventist Internet evangelism conference in England.
Several countries are sustaining their population solely on the arrival of immigrants. Germany’s population would have declined since at least 1970, were it not for the net migration gains, Moyer says.
In the Netherlands, which has long received newcomers from former Dutch colonies, Henk Koning, secretary of the Adventist Church there, says new groups began coming from Ghana in the 1990s. At the same time church leaders also noticed a small percentage of immigrants coming from Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia and other former Soviet countries.
The non-native membership of Dutch Adventist churches has grown to 45 percent of the country’s 4,600 members, Koning says.
While church leaders look at any kind of growth in their churches as good, there is concern that native church members are not always feeling at home any longer in their own churches, according to Koning.
“[Some] fear that native Adventism will disappear or greatly diminish in five to 10 years,” Koning says.
This fear is not reflected in Ireland, according to Stephen Wilson, who pastors there. Though Church membership for the region is less than 400 members, he says the Central Adventist Church in Galway City, is a great example of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual church.
“We have a Portuguese, Russian and sometimes a Polish Sabbath School,” Wilson says of the church with members from 20 different nations. Because of the welcome given by local members no group wants its own worship service.”
In France, Bernard Sauvagnat, director of evangelism for the Adventist Church’s Franco-Belgian region, says about 80 percent of the Adventist Church’s membership is not native to France.
Moyer says immigration in Europe and North America is different—North America drawing largely Hispanic newcomers, while in some parts of Europe immigrants hail from Islamic countries.
But there are similarities, he says. In places like Europe and North America, native Adventist Church membership is remaining steady or declining in the face of growing immigrant churches.
Vontzalidis says he believes this is happening because in much of Europe church is not central to daily life. One study , published in April, found that only 10 percent of the English population regularly attends church.
Vontzalidis says many immigrant church members are not recent converts but those who belonged to the Adventist Church in their home countries.
“Immigrant churches are not doing more evangelism,” says Monte Sahlin, director of research and special projects for the Adventist Church in Ohio, United States. Sahlin says from his research in America “a majority of baptisms throughout North America are among those who are immigrants who only constitute 12 to 15 percent of the population.
Some immigrant churches grow, he says, because they receive immigrants who are already Adventist.