How Do Adventist Institutions Handle Whistleblowing and Accountability — Is There a Structural Gap?

Executive summary

The Seventh-day Adventist Church's governance structure relies on hierarchical appeals—disputes escalate from local church to conference to union to General Conference—as its primary accountability mechanism. However, this system presumes that those reporting misconduct can safely work within the chain of command, an assumption that fails when the misconduct involves the very leaders who control that chain. No publicly available evidence indicates the existence of independent whistleblower hotli...