The church reports around 24 million baptised members in more than a hundred thousand congregations, which makes it one of the larger Protestant bodies in the world and, more to the point, one of the most evenly spread: Adventism has a presence in more countries than almost any other denomination, a direct result of a mission strategy pursued single-mindedly since the nineteenth century.
The overwhelming majority of members are in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Growth is fastest in sub-Saharan Africa, and the church's largest fields are far from the North American conferences that still hold much of its institutional and financial weight.
Governance is representative and, unusually for a body of this size, closer to presbyterian than episcopal. Local churches send delegates upward through local conferences, union conferences and thirteen world divisions to the General Conference, which meets in session every five years and is the church's highest authority. Authority is described as arising from the membership rather than descending from the top.
The live internal dispute is the ordination of women to the ministry, and it maps almost exactly onto that demographic shift. The 2015 General Conference session in San Antonio voted 1,381 to 977 against permitting divisions to decide the question for themselves. Several unions in North America and Europe have ordained women regardless, and the General Conference has spent the years since attempting to enforce compliance without expelling anyone. The vote broke largely along the line between the growing churches of the Global South and the older, shrinking ones of the West, which is the same fault line visible in Anglicanism and Methodism, arriving here through a different constitution.