Dakota Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
The Dakota Conference of Seventh-day Adventists' corporate office, located at 7200 N Washington Street, Bismarck, North Dakota, serves as church headquarters for Seventh-day Adventist members living in North and South Dakota.
The motto of the Dakota Conference is “Sharing the unchanging love of Jesus in a changing world.” Dakota Adventists are passionate about worship, health, education and the joy of serving Jesus Christ. Each Sabbath (Saturday) morning, nearly 4,000 members gather to worship in 47 churches, companies and groups. Sabbath School, the Bible study portion of the service, typically begins at 9:30 am and the worship hour typically begins at 11:00 am. (Individual church times can be verified under the Community tab, then choose Dakota Churches.)
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is the most racially diverse religious group in the United States. We embrace people regardless of race, national origin, gender, color, age, marital status or disability.
Dakota Conference operates seven primary schools across the two states and one secondary boarding school, Dakota Adventist Academy located on one thousand acres north of Bismarck. Each summer Dakota members and guests gather at the academy for an annual 5-day convocation called Campmeeting. It is a time of training, inspiration and fellowship. Summer camps for children, teens and families are held at Northern Lights Camp along the Canadian border and Flag Mountain Camp in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota.
Dakota Conference is home to Dakota Adventist Book Center, a subsidiary of the Kansas-Nebraska Adventist Book Center, which is located in Bismarck, ND at the corporate office.
Each church in the conference is “representative.” Local churches vote their own officers and church boards by nomination annually. Delegates from churches meet executively throughout the year to facilitate mission and every five years to vote conference personnel.
The Larger Organization
Similarly churches are organized into conferences in Iowa-Missouri, Kansas-Nebraska, Minnesota and Colorado-Wyoming. An African-American conference called Central States also exists throughout these locations, which together with the Dakota Conference constitute the Mid-America Union.
Unions are organized throughout the world into Divisions and Divisions into a worldwide unit called the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists located at Silver Spring, Maryland. The churches, unions and divisions are all representative. A similar process of representation functions at the union and division levels as happens at the local church level.
Various Seventh-day Adventist institutions operate within these levels to further the gospel of Jesus Christ: educational; health-care; publishing; and media outreach. Jesus’ method of loving compassion to relieve suffering by ministering to peoples’ needs, and bidding them to follow Him, is our corporate mission.