At the first General Conference (GC) Session, held in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1863, only 20 delegates were selected to draft the Seventh-day Adventist Church constitution and bylaws and establish top leadership including president, secretary, and treasurer. This administrative structure remains at all levels of church administration.
As the church has grown, so has the number of delegates. This is because the selection of voting delegates is based on church membership in each world region. The number of delegates nearly doubled by the 1879 session. By the 1909 session, just 30 years later, the number of delegates grew substantially to 328, which is an increase of 164 percent. By the forty-seventh session in 1954, the number of delegates increased to 1,109, which is an increase of 5,545 percent! Over the next 60+ years the number of delegates more than doubled again to 2,713 by the sixty-first session in 2022! At the upcoming sixty-second session to be held in St. Louis, Missouri, there will be approximately 2,800 delegates, indicating that the church continues to grow.
