February 4, 2026
During the 2023 North American Division (NAD) year-end meetings, Kyoshin Ahn, executive secretary of the NAD, presented a secretary’s report that included demographic data on North American congregations. In one section, Ahn compared Adventist congregations in the US to the broader Christian church.
When it comes to immigration, he showed that Adventists far surpass not only the national average of immigrants in the population, but also the Christian average. NAD churches are made up of roughly twice as many immigrants—26 percent—as US churches overall. They also include a higher proportion of immigrants than the general populations of both the US—13 percent—and Canada—22 percent. These numbers are significant; they reveal something important about church growth in North America. Put simply, membership gains are driven by immigration. As Ahn stated plainly, “This is where our growth is happening.”
When I look at these statistics, what I see is the story of a dying church, its decline obscured by immigrant vitality. Immigrant churches are growing, sustained by people who often work time- and labor-intensive jobs six days a week, only to come to church and spend the entire Sabbath in fellowship. Immigrant congregations tend to be active: they regularly hold evangelistic meetings, host Saturday night socials, gather for after-church potlucks, and plant new churches in their cities.
Our immigrant sisters and brothers are not peripheral to the church; as noted by the Lake Union, they are central to its life and future. When they are met with violent, authoritarian immigration enforcement, the church is faced with a moral choice: Will we uphold our Christian values, or will we continue to support an increasingly erratic enforcement system—one that has already resulted in the deaths of US citizens and immigrants alike, and whose violence continues to escalate?
Last week, I read the story of an evangelical pastor in West Texas who identifies himself as a Republican, believes in stronger immigration enforcement, and voted for US President Donald Trump on that basis. He is now housing immigrants in his church and helping reunite mothers who were chaotically deported without their children—left behind by Department of Homeland Security agents who failed to follow due process in assisting in reunification. Although this pastor still considers himself a Republican and still supports strong immigration enforcement, he believes the church cannot allow the separation of families or the inhumane treatment of immigrants.
This is values-based Christianity in a world driven by political religiosity. It offers a path forward, irrespective of one’s position on immigration enforcement. For Adventists—global as our denomination is, and ethnically and culturally diverse as our North American congregations are—we carry a particular responsibility to speak and act on behalf of our immigrant neighbors. And yet, when I peruse comments on a recent SPECTRUM post about a family detained by ICE during a medical emergency, I see calls for “law and order” and skepticism that the family was not being paid by anti-government groups. In response to social media posts from pastors calling for empathy, I see Adventists resorting to prayers rather than actions, exhorting these pastors to simply “trust God.”
After an auspicious start as staunch anti-abolitionists, Adventists slowly let the current of fundamentalism—later rebranded as evangelicalism—carry them into murky waters of state submission. We saw this during the rise of Nazism, when the Adventist Church, instead of uniting in opposition to the egregious attacks on Jewish and other marginalized communities, largely bowed to the state order. We saw it during the Rwandan genocide, when the Adventist Church, along with the rest of the Western world, stood idly by while millions of Tutsis were murdered, some at the hands of Adventists themselves.
Now again, we are faced with a decision that to many feels political but is really a matter of Christian virtue. What do we do when masked agents attack people on the streets? What do we do when our own Adventist neighbors are targeted, even taken on their way to church?
This is a time, once again, when Adventists should be at the forefront. We should be calling loudly for an end to the violence in Minnesota and across the country. We should be extending a helping hand wherever we can. Many are. But many more are not.
Image: Raquel Mentor/SPECTRUM
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