The Seventh-day Adventist Church organised its General Conference at Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1863, a step the movement had resisted for years on the ground that organisation was what had gone wrong with other churches. The resulting structure is deliberately layered: the local church, the local conference of churches in an area, the union conference of local conferences, and the General Conference over all of them, with divisions of the General Conference acting as its regional branch offices rather than as independent tiers.
The most consequential change came in 1901, when the structure was reorganised to create the union conferences and devolve authority that had accumulated at the centre. The reform is generally described within the church as a deliberate dispersal of power, and its practical effect is that decisions about congregations and pastors sit several levels below the world headquarters.
Headquarters moved from Battle Creek to Takoma Park in the District of Columbia in 1903, and to Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1989. What the world body actually operates from there is administrative and institutional rather than pastoral: a very large network of schools and universities, a hospital and clinic system, a publishing arm, a development and relief agency, and the statistical and archival office whose annual reports are among the most detailed produced by any denomination.