Seventh-Day Adventists

In Law of the Harvest, the Seventh-Day Adventists are the recurring comparison faith that anchors the book’s strictness-drives-growth argument. Stewart cites them as a High-Demand Religion whose commitments are “comparable and in some ways more demanding” than the LDS Church’s — a health law stricter than the Word of Wisdom (no alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, plus a near-vegetarian diet), Saturday worship, and months of pre-baptismal Bible study — yet they retain 78% of new members and grow 8–11% annually, against the roughly 22% lifelong-activity rate cited for LDS converts. The book uses them (alongside the Jehovah’s Witnesses) to argue that high membership requirements raise, not depress, Convert Retention: “faiths that require little offer little.” It also marshals their scale in the developing world — over 4 million active members in Africa, 10,000 baptized in Tanzania in a single day, virtually all having completed pre-baptismal courses — to argue that prebaptismal preparation, not chapel-building, drives durable growth.

Context: The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a Protestant denomination that emerged from the 19th-century Millerite movement, distinguished by Saturday (seventh-day) Sabbath observance and a strong emphasis on health and diet. It is one of the fastest-growing Christian denominations globally.

Where this appears

• Law of the Harvest — the high-retention (78%), high-growth comparison faith whose strict pre-baptismal requirements anchor Stewart’s strictness-drives-growth argument.