The Inter-American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church closed the first four months of 2025 with more than 87,000 new baptisms, a result the organization itself described as without recent precedent. The high point was a large baptismal celebration broadcast live from the Expo Convenciones Chiapas, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico, on April 26, 2025.
The data were released by the Adventist News Network (ANN) and by the official site of the Inter-American Division (interamerica.org). The event was part of the Esperanza Interamericana: El cielo te espera campaign — in English, roughly "Inter-American Hope: Heaven Awaits You" —, a coordinated preaching effort that mobilized pastors, elders and lay members across 25 unions spread over Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the northern part of South America.
What happened in Chiapas
On Saturday, April 26, 2025, the Adventist Church gathered at the Expo Convenciones Chiapas complex, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, for a baptism ceremony broadcast across the entire territory of the Inter-American Division. According to the Division's official site, the gathering was the visible conclusion of a preaching campaign that had already been unfolding in thousands of congregations over the previous months.
According to the Adventist News Network, the celebration featured regional leaders and about 130 guest evangelists from different countries of Inter-America. Beyond the baptisms carried out on site, the figure released — more than 87,000 — adds up the results from January to April across the whole Division, not just those of the day of the broadcast.
Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, was chosen as the stage precisely because it is one of the church's strongest territories in the region. The Division's site reports that the Mexican Union of Chiapas gathers about 3,600 congregations and works with roughly 11,000 small groups — the Bible-study cells that, in practice, sustain this kind of campaign.
Where the 87,000 baptisms came from
The overall figure spreads across several unions, but a few fields drove the result. According to the data released by the Inter-American Division, the highlights of the period were:
| Territory | New baptisms (Jan–Apr 2025) |
|---|---|
| Mexican Union of Chiapas | More than 23,000 |
| Inter-Oceanic Mexican Union | 10,342 |
| Dominican Union | About 4,500 |
| Haitian Union | 3,985 |
The Mexican Union of Chiapas alone, therefore, accounted for more than a quarter of all the Division's baptisms in the period — more than 23,000 people since January, according to the Adventist News Network report. The other numbers came from fields as far apart as the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which gives a sense of the geographic scale of the effort.
A note on journalistic method is worth making: the figures above are those officially released by the church in April and May 2025 and may be adjusted later, as each field's records are consolidated. It is common, in large campaigns, for final totals to undergo small variations relative to the first announcements.
What the Inter-American Division is (and why it is not ours)
Here a clarification is worth making, one that avoids confusion, especially for the Brazilian audience. The Adventist Church organizes the world into 13 administrative divisions. The Inter-American Division (IAD) covers Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the far north of South America — Colombia, Venezuela and the Guianas. It is one of the church's most populous regions on the planet.
Brazil is not part of Inter-America. Brazilian Pathfinders belong to the South American Division (SAD), which brings together eight South American countries. They are two neighboring divisions, but each with its own leadership, calendar and materials. In other words: this Chiapas campaign changes nothing in your club's routine — the interest here is context, not rule.
A Union, a term that appears throughout this story, is the administrative level that brings together several conferences and missions within a country or region. The Inter-American Division has 25 unions; the South American Division, where the Brazilian clubs are, has its own equivalent structure. Keeping that difference in mind helps to read any international Adventist news without getting lost in the alphabet soup.
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The result of 87,000 baptisms in just four months drew attention because it puts the Division on track for an impressive annual mark. According to the Inter-American Division's own coverage, leadership was projecting for 2025 a level of baptisms the region had not reached in years — a long-term ambition publicly embraced by its leaders.
That momentum did not come out of nowhere. The Division reported that, in the period between 2020 and 2025, more than 800,000 new members joined the church across Inter-America. The Chiapas campaign is, in that sense, the most recent and most visible chapter of a growth cycle the organization had been building over five years.
The strategy that was announced has a name and a method. Under the motto "The Whole Family in Mission" (in Spanish, Toda la Familia en Misión), the church focused its work on training elders and local leaders and on the functioning of small groups. Before the campaign, according to the Division's site, thousands of Chiapas elders went through training sessions in early 2025 to lead Bible studies and prepare candidates for baptism.
Where Pathfinders fit into this picture
For the reader who lives the world of the clubs, one question remains: what does a baptism campaign in Mexico have to do with Pathfinders? The answer lies in the method. Adventist evangelistic campaigns rely on small groups and on youth ministries — and the Pathfinder Club is, historically, one of the main entry doors for children and teenagers into the church.
It is no coincidence that the Pathfinder world itself has a specific baptismal milestone: the club's class and activities walk hand in hand with discipleship, and many pre-teen baptisms happen precisely in the context of camporees, weeks of prayer and club ceremonies. Baptism, in Adventist theology, is a personal decision by immersion, made by someone who already has the age and understanding to choose — not an automatic rite.
In the South American Division, Brazilian clubs follow this same logic within their own calendar. Inter-America's coverage serves, for the Pathfinder here, as a portrait of scale: it shows what the mobilization of thousands of small groups and volunteer leaders is capable of producing when it works as a network — the same principle that sustains every unit of a club.
Who led it and what the leaders said
The Chiapas celebration involved the main names of the regional administration. According to the Inter-American Division's site, those taking part included the Division president, Pastor Elie Henry, the vice president Balvin Braham — who coordinates the area of evangelism — and the president of the Mexican Union of Chiapas, Pastor Ignacio Navarro, along with representatives of the church's world headquarters.
Presenting the "The Whole Family in Mission" strategy, Pastor Balvin Braham stated, in a declaration reproduced by the Division's site, that the church was being called to prepare other people for the "kingdom of heaven." The emphasis, repeated by leaders throughout the campaign, was that the result was not the work of great isolated evangelists, but of the involvement of elders, local leaders and entire families.
For the coming months, the Division signaled that it intends to keep the pace of mobilization begun in the first four-month period. The figure of 87,000 baptisms, released at the end of April, was presented by the organization itself as a starting point for the rest of 2025 — and not as a ceiling.