Broadening the Boundaries of Church-Sect Theory: Insights from the Evolution of the Nonschismatic Mission Churches of Seventh-Day Adventism

This article extends the theory of sect development by showing, through comparative analysis, that the development trajectories of foreign mission churches controlled from a national home base are influenced by the trajectories followed by their home religious bodies. It also suggests that the trajectories of mission churches not controlled by home religious bodies are far more responsive to differing local circumstances. In applying church-sect theory, which has typically focused on schismatic groups within a single society, to national branches of international religious bodies imported as a result of missionary activity or migration, the paper demonstrates that the dynamics can be similar in key ways. In doing this, it builds on Bryan Wilson's employment of church-sect theory in his study of nonschismatic new religious movements in developing countries. The data show that the dynamics in the 204 countries where Seventh-day Adventism has been imported are akin to those in the United States, where its origin was schismatic. That is, even though we would expect that Adventism in most of these countries would be highly sectarian since the members there are mostly first-generation converts, this is not so: the churches there, like the American church, are moving from sect toward denomination. However, when Adventists are compared with Jehovah's Winesses and Pentecostals, both of which are also expanding rapidly in developing countries, it is found that the trajectories taken by all three differ considerably. The strength of ties to a global organization proves to be highly significant in accounting for the directions taken. Since the patterns that emerge in the mission churches of hierarchical, centralized groups tend to parallel those set originally in their home bases, the anlaysis allows the prediction of the global profiles which such groups will develop.