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The Seventh-day Adventist Church has released the advance edition of its 2025 Annual Statistical Report, detailing 2024 membership reports. Published by the General Conference’s (GC) Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, the report presents division-level data on baptisms, attendance, and overall membership. As of December 31, 2024, global church membership reached 23,684,237—an increase from 22,785,195 in 2023, representing a net gain of 899,042 members. The East-Central Africa Division reported the greatest increase with over 446,000 baptisms and professions of faith, pushing its membership to more than 5.7 million. The Southern Asia Division and Inter-American Division also posted strong numbers, with...

According to the centuries-old rules of the Roman Catholic Church, sin-reduction is a two-step process. Guilt is absolved through confession and prayer, but punishment — on earth or in purgatory — can be avoided through indulgences, an ancient form of church-granted amnesty that critics deride as a shortcut to salvation. The door for indulgences is not always open, though, and for years after the Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, they were rarely offered — until 2000, when Pope John Paul II started using them to attract pilgrims to World Youth Day. Today, Pope Benedict XVI put out the latest...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Present trends suggest a declining future for many communities of men and women religious, but religious are called to imagine a different future, Sister Doris Gottemoeller said Feb. 3. Sister Gottemoeller, former president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas and of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and Father Canice Connors, a former provincial minister of the Conventual Franciscans and former president of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, were the main speakers at Washington Theological Union's annual Religious Life Symposium. The theme of this year's symposium was "Re-Imagining Religious Life in the 21st...