Every five years the General Conference meets in session, with delegates from the divisions and unions of the world, and the session is the only body that can do certain things. It elects the president, secretary and treasurer of the world church and the officers of the divisions. It alone may amend the Church Manual, the book that governs how a local congregation is constituted, disciplined and run. And it alone may alter the statement of Fundamental Beliefs, the twenty-eight articles adopted in their present form in 1980 and amended since, which is the nearest thing the denomination has to a creed while being explicitly held as revisable in the light of scripture.
Because delegates come in proportion to membership, and because membership growth has for decades been fastest in Africa and Latin America, the composition of the session has shifted substantially away from the church's countries of origin. Sessions are consequently the moments at which a global denomination discovers what its global membership actually thinks, and the results have not always matched expectations formed in North America or Europe.
The church publishes its own numbers rigorously. The annual statistical report gives membership, accessions, losses, institutions and finance by division, and the same office maintains the archives and the encyclopedia of the denomination, which makes Adventism one of the better documented religious bodies of its size.