That statement is of the form...
"How dare you quote and independent organization like ChristianityToday saying something positive about the Adventist denomination.. how delusional"
You have free will of course and can post that on a thread about the millennium if you so wish.
I think what my Canadian colleague
@MarkRohfrietsch wished to express was that since the statistics from Pew Research and other services that are more specialized in calculating church membership than ChristianityToday, since generating statistics about churches is the primary business of Pew Research, whereas ChristianityToday is a news site focused on journalism, and journalists sometimes make factual errors, as do collectors of statistics, although in statistics we account for this with something called “the margin of error”; advanced statistics can also produce erroneous output, but church membership is extremely basic; you could seriously do it all in Excel or by hand, since you are only counting one value; multiple demographics are handled using advanced software like SAS, which is extremely powerful and expensive, and SPSS, which is probably the most powerful and expensive option, since it is developed by IBM and runs on a wide range of hardware, up to and including the massive IBM mainframes that have driven mission critical applications since the 1960s, such as airline reservations, credit card processing, and during the Apollo program, NASA’s Real Time Computing Center, which you can read a neat history of here:
https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch8-2.html
The bottom line is the only thing in the article favorable to the SDA in its current form was the incorrect statement that it was the fifth largest denomination. I have provided information showing that is not the case, and
@icedragon101 helpfully linked to the same statistics I used when calculating both on the size of communions (churches in full Eucharistic union with each other, which is the metric the ChristianityToday article used, which are either one church or one denominational “family” in full communion, for example, the Calvary Chapel is one single church, which has 25 million members and was left out of the article, and the Lutheran World Federation, which they also omitted - it was the omission of these communions that made the article inaccurate with respect to size.
As I have said before, I also ran the numbers on the basis of individual denominations only, and the results were almost identical, largely because several of the denominations, such as the Anglican Communion, the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox (which the article omitted) and the Assemblies of God have one church which is extremely large and accounts for the vast majority of their membership. Using the examples given above, the Anglican Communion has the Church of England with 26 million members, the Eastern Orthodox has the Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, with 200 million members, the Oriental Orthodox has the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church with 30 million members, and finally you have the Assembly of God in Brazil with approximately 43 million. And the Calvary Chapel has 25 million, and so on.
Because we are talking about hard data verified from multiple sources and using rigorous statistics, and because the logical flaw in the ChristianityToday article is obvious, and really sloppy, to be frank (I could understand the author accidentally grouping the Oriental Orthodox with the Eastern Orthodox, although it does not appear that he did that, but rather simply failed to include them, along with the Lutheran World Federation, the Methodist World Federation, and the similiar communions of Reformed and Baptist churches, and the Calvary Chapel, which like the SDA is a single integrated denomination of American origin, albeit larger to the tune of 4 million members, but it was overlooked by the author.
Growth rate is another matter; the data I have looks like the Evangelical Church of Germany is growing faster than the SDA, which is ... highly unexpected, to put it mildly, and I do not have enough information on denominational membership year over year to authenticate the article’s claims on growth rate.
While the gross and obvious statistical errors in the Christianity Today article do point to a serious defect in their fact checking process, I do agree with the premise of the article, that the SDA should be more evangelical, which makes the errors even more frustrating, because I cannot cite the article, even though I agree with its premise. To cite the article in any way, owing to the gross defects that multiple members have identified and verified, would be logically fallacious, amounting to both an appeal to false authority, and an appeal to ignorance. This I believe was what
@MarkRohfrietsch was referring to, more than anything else.
Logically fallacious arguments, such as argumentum ad hominem, appeals to false authority, non sequiturs, red herrings, strawman fallacies and appeals to ignorance are misleading both to the person who employs them, and people who accept them as fact; they do not contribute to the discovery of Truth and Reason, which are embodied in our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, who is the Divine Logos. Therefore, we should, as Christians, endeavor to familiarize ourselves with logic and also with good dialectic technique, so as to avoid fallacious arguments, and indeed minimize arguments altogether, in favor of dialogues which are mutually edifying.
At the same time, I cannot help but feel that being the tenth largest denomination is anything to be upset about. Most churches would be thrilled to have ten million members, let alone 21 million.
