There is a question quietly circulating in Seventh-day Adventist churches across North America, one that surfaces in board meetings, pastoral conversations, and honest exchanges between generations: Do adults ages 25 to 40 find the SDA Church relevant? And the harder question that often follows: Do they find it restrictive?
Based on more than a decade of working in Children, Youth, and Young Adult ministry, my answer to both questions is yes, and the two answers are not as contradictory as they might seem.
The Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study identified Seventh-day Adventists as one of the relatively younger Christian denominations in the United States, with a median age of around 45, younger than Presbyterians or members of the United Church of Christ, but still aging. Meanwhile, the SDA Church's own Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research estimated the average age of a U.S. Adventist at around 50, presenting what church leaders described as a major challenge for retention and engagement of younger adults. The Barna Group, commissioned by the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists, surveyed young adults who currently attend or previously attended SDA congregations. The findings showed that nearly four in ten Adventist millennials described Adventist churches as repressive of differences, a higher rate than the national norm for young Christians overall. More than one in three described Adventist churches as feeling like an exclusive club, and nearly twice as many Adventist millennials called the church anti-science compared to their broader millennial peers. Those are sobering numbers. But they do not tell the whole story.
Recent Barna research shows that Millennials and Gen Z are now attending church more frequently than before, and more frequently than older generations, which represents a historic reversal of a long-standing pattern. Young people are not abandoning faith; many are actively seeking it. As one SDA Church leader put it, survey data overwhelmingly shows that young Americans are not becoming atheistic, they are rejecting organized religion, which means the challenge may not be interest in Christ, but interest in the institutional church. The distinction matters enormously.
I want to be clear about something I have observed firsthand: many of the barriers that young adults ages 25 to 40 experience in the SDA Church are not rooted in doctrine or theology. They are rooted in culture, in the unwritten rules, the gatekeeping, and the reluctance of established leadership to share power with the next generation. Some of our SDA members are CEOs of corporations. They manage hundreds of employees, navigate complex financial decisions, and lead high-stakes strategy sessions Monday through Friday. But on Sabbath, they are passed over when it comes to meaningful church decisions. They are not trusted with the board votes, the budgets, or the vision of the congregation. The message, however unintentional, is: your competence belongs to the world, but not here.
This is a man-made problem. It is not the Seventh-day Adventist Church at its best. It is the church at its most insecure.
The Parable of the Wineskins
Jesus addressed this tension long before any research study did. In Matthew 9:17, He said: "Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."
The message is not that the wine, the gospel, the mission, the truth, needs to change. The wine is the wine. What must flex is the vessel that carries it. When the church insists on housing the energy, creativity, and vision of the 25-to-40 generation in structures that were designed for a completely different era, something breaks. Either the young adult leaves, or the church loses the vitality that generation was meant to provide. New wineskins do not mean abandoning Adventist identity. They mean creating space, real, substantive space, for younger adults to lead, to decide, to fail, and to grow within the body of Christ.
What I Have Seen in Eleven Years
In over a decade of Children, Youth, and Young Adult ministry leadership, one pattern stood out above all others: young adults do not primarily leave the SDA Church because of the theology. They leave because they feel invisible in the decision-making life of the congregation. They come to church, they participate in programs someone else designed, they sit in meetings where someone else decides, and eventually they ask themselves why they keep showing up. Research bears this out, millennials repeatedly identify a desire for authentic leadership opportunities in ministry as a key factor in their engagement with church life. They do not want to run the snack table at a potluck. They want to be trusted with vision. They want their education, their professional experience, and their spiritual gifts to count for something inside the walls of the church, not just outside of them.
The SDA Church has a message uniquely suited for this generation. Its emphasis on holistic health, its global mission, its prophetic identity, and its community-centered lifestyle are precisely the things that adults in their 25-to-40 range are hungry for in a fragmented, anxious world. The theology is not the problem. The opportunity before SDA congregations is to become the new wineskins, to trust younger adults with real authority, real roles, and real belonging. Not because it is trendy, but because it is biblical. The early church appointed leaders from among the people, prayed over them, and released them into their calling. That model has not expired.
The wine is still good. It is time to check the wineskins.
Dr. Patrick G. Graham has served in Children, Youth, and Young Adult leadership in the Seventh-day Adventist Church for over eleven years and is currently the pastor of The Glenridge SDA Church in the Allegheny East Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.