What Is Wrong With The Word "Adventism"?
by Richard O'Ffill
There is a word out there these days that is changing the way that we see our church. And that word is "Adventism." At the risk of causing you to stop listening even before I get started, I am going to tell you why I am not comfortable with this word and why. I am going to tell you why I believe that looking at our church from a perspective of "Adventism" will have both long range and short range consequences. I will explain to you how the institutionalization of the concept represented by this word "Adventism" may very well work against what the Lordraised up this church to be and what He raised it up to do in the generation that would proceed His coming.
Let me begin by saying that my Parents, grandparents and great grandparents were members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. They didn't refer to themselves in the context of "Adventism"in those days. They did refer to themselves though, in relation to what they termed was "the message" or what they referred to as "the Truth".
Did you know that those who became finally be the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church did not at first envision themselves as starting a new denomination much less a sub-culture called "Adventism?" They were a mixture of mostly Methodists and Baptists and a few people of other faiths. To establish a church was the farthest thing from their minds. They were for the most part pork-eating Sunday keepers who through a study of scripture became convinced that Jesus coming was just around the corner. Those who were living in the few years leading up to October 22, 1844 became convinced through a study of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel that Jesus was about to come and somehow missing the point that we cannot know the day or the hour they decided on the year and the day. Then they got serious and began to tell anyone who would listen.
I remember that a few years ago the president of a Christian radio network began to preach thatJesus was going to rapture away his people on a certain day. The wire services picked up that story and so did the TV talk shows. This man was given virtually nationwide exposure to preach his belief that Jesus was coming on a certain day which would be 2000 years from a beginning time that he established. I heard that he got the 2000 years from the two thousand pigs that Jesus sent running down the hillside into the sea of Galilee. In any event this man went everywhere preaching his conviction. I was listening to someone reviewing what happened and they commented that to their knowledge the brother didn't ever sell all that he had and really cut his ties with this earth. When the day in September came and went and the rapture didn't occur he just went on as if nothing had happened. By the way, this man can still be heard nightly on a Christian Radio network.
I am telling you this to contrast his experience with those of the those who [came] to be known as the early Adventists. The weren't Seventh-day Adventists yet. They were, as I said, Sunday-keeping-pork-eating Adventists. It is said that some of the early advent preachers even had spittoons by the pulpits. But one thing is for sure. They loved the Lord with all their hearts and more than anything they wanted to be waiting for Him when he would come on October 22,1844.
My dad was selling books from door to door when he was a young man. He went to one house and gave his presentation for the books. The people didn't buy anything but they began to talk about the things that were going on in the world. My dad tells me that he gave them a Bible study on the second coming of Jesus. The man who he was talking to said, "Come with me, I have got to show you something." There in the dining room, in the china closet was a large set of dishes. The man said to dad, "See that set of dishes? My grandfather bought them from a family that was selling everything that they had just before October 22, l844." The family had obviously sold everything that they had to get ready for the coming of Jesus. My dad was very impressed and asked the man if he could have a souvenir dish. The gentleman graciously gave him a small dish which I have to this day.
I am telling you this to say that the people that where the founding fathers of our faith did not set out to set themselves up in business but to close up shop. They didn't do what the man from the radio network did. He kept his options open. In 1844 they sacrificed everything for their convictions. Not only did the early advent believers lose money for their faith, but they lost their friends who often said they were crazy. Many of them were disfellowshipped from their churches. So when October 22 came and passed they were not only greatly disappointed but they had to start their lives all over again and their lives would never be the same.
You probably know something of what happened after that. After the disappointment there were three classes of people. First there were the people who gave up on God all together, then there were others who went back to their churches. The last group were those who became what we might call people without a country. That is they had no place to go. They were convinced that God doesn't make mistakes, so they began to study the Bible prophecies all over again. As they went along God began to back them up by giving visions to a teenage girl who later became Mrs. Ellen White.
And so a new denomination was eventually born. It took the name Seventh-day Adventist for obvious reasons. The new denomination still considered itself a message and the name Seventh-day Adventist said what that message was. The Denomination has prospered even thought it doesn't have many members as far as denominations go. If you want to compare even ten million members of our church with the almost a billion Catholics or even forty million or so Baptist we don't have much to brag about. Still the Denomination has prospered. This little crowd has an extensive overseas outreach. I have heard that as far as denominations go our parochial school system is the largest in the Protestant world. I don't need to tell you about the medical side. It too is big and international in scope.
Speaking of the medical side of our denomination. Our church has always given a big emphasis to health whether it be staying healthy or helping people to get well. Science has done research on Adventist populations and concluded that the people who follow what is now called the "Adventist Lifestyle" live from 7- 11 years longer than the general population. This is good news but there is also a down side. One is that fewer and fewer Adventists are following the Adventist lifestyle. The other is that we make a mistake to call it the "Adventist" lifestyle. What we call the "Adventist" lifestyle is not from the Adventists, it is from the Scripture. We could be making a mistake when we call it the "Adventist Lifestyle "because if that was true you would have to be an Adventist to be into it. The fact, ladies and gentlemen, is the health message that is from the Scripture is not just for Adventist it is for the whole human race. When we call it the "Adventist lifestyle" we are making it sound like it belongs to us and rather than make people want to get in on it, it could actually alienate people and rather than attract them to health could actually drive them away.
Remember I said in the beginning that I am not comfortable with the word "Adventism". God didn't raise up this church to be another "ism" or another option among all the other isms like Catholicism or Methodism. Can't you see "isms" are only for the dues paying members. We were not raised up to be another denomination as such. We were raised up to be a group of people that had something to share with all of the other people be they Baptist, Methodists, Catholics or Charismatics and even the unsaved.
Tell me. Are Seventh-day Adventists the only ones who are true Christians? Are Seventh-day Adventists the only ones who have salvation? Are Seventh-day Adventists the only ones who love Jesus? If you answer no to all of these questions then you are confronted with some really big issues. If Adventists are not the only ones who have salvation, If they are not the only ones who love Jesus, then we have to come to grips with the question as to why we are Seventh-day Adventist at all. Are we just going to a lot of trouble from nothing?
Here is where I have problems with the word "Adventism". The more that we use this word the bigger the problems that we create. One of the problems is that to use the word can actually make it look like we belong to an elite club and everyone who isn't a member is some kind of a lesser life form. Another problem can be that our church simply becomes our favorite charity. Every body has one, you know. We really don't mind who is who. We don't care if you are a Baptist or a Methodist or a Catholic or whatever, after all what difference does it make really we are all the same thing in the end. And besides it is not my place to judge who of us is right and who is wrong.
If we go back into history for a moment I believe we will see what has happened to us. Don't forget, those who don't learn from history are sure to repeat it. You remember in the first place God created the human race. You know the story of how sin came. When this happened God had a huge problem and that was to maintain a tie with this planet which had now joined the rebellion against God's government. But God is gracious and merciful. Though the human race was intent on doing itself in, our Heavenly Father was just as intent on seeing that it didn't happen or at least that there would be a way out for those who wanted out. To do this He had to open a line of communication with the race, He did this in a number ways. One of them was that He established what actually became a nation of people. They were the Hebrews-that called out ones. Later, of course, they would be know as the Jews and their nation was called Israel.
Now we must understand that God didn't love the Jews more than he loved the rest of his children. He didn't choose that the Jews because they were a perfect people who were always faithful to Him, yet it was necessary to have somebody here through whom He would be able to communicate truth and light at a time when the world would more and more be filled with lies and darkness. More important still, God planned to actually come personally into the human race. He had to have a gene pool for this and not only a gene pool but an ideology that would recognize Him and understand what He had come here to do.
You know the story. It is all history now. God established the Jewish nation, not for the Jews, but for the whole human race. It would be through their gene pool that the Messiah would come and it would be through the revelations of truth to them that the world would be prepared to receive him when He came the first time. You see then, the Jews were to be a nation with a message. That message was not to be for Jews but for everyone. But then guess what? You guessed it. The Truth that the Jews had been so graciously given, the light that had been put in their way became obscured by. Yes, there it is, by Judaism.
Please listen to me now. It was the establishment of Judaism that kept the world from being ready for the coming of the Messiah and worse than that it was the establishment of Judaism that set the stage for the murder of the Son of God. You see Judaism was for Jews. Where God had given a message that was to be for all nations and all peoples, Judaism made sure that you had to be a Jew to get at it. Not only that, they loaded the message up with all kinds of things that were extraneous to the original intent and that made it even difficult for the Jews themselves to understand the message. The message that God gave to the Jews that was to be shared with all the world was that God was going to send the Messiah and that through the Messiah all the world could have salvation if they would accept Him as their Savior.
Now lets move ahead 2000 years. God gave a message to a group people who were Methodists, Baptists and who knows what else. This message had as it's purpose to push the gospel of Jesus Christ to its finest hour and that would be actually to prepare a living Generation to be alive to see Jesus face to face and be translated into heaven without seeing death. But then there comes "Adventism". The message was to be for anyone and everyone, but "Adventism" is for Adventists only. Now before you come to the wrong conclusion. Let me focus this a little clearer. I am persuaded that the Seventh-day Adventist Church is the carrier of God's last warning message for the world. A message that is for all of God's people wherever you may find them.
The message of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is directed to God's people wherever you find them especially in the other church communions, because it says, using the words of the message of the third angel of Revelation 14, "Come out of her my people that you be not partakers of her plagues." What I am trying to say is that I believe that it was and is the will of God that the Seventh-day Adventist Church come into being. The Denomination was to be, though, a means to an end and not an end in itself. Did you get that? I said that the denomination was to be a means to an end and not an end in itself. God gave a message to be carried to all the world and you had to have a basket to carry it in. That basket was this denomination. We are not just any denomination or like every denomination, we are the denomination that was ordained to carry a life and death message to a people who would be alive when Jesus would come the second time.
Now there were a lot of nations around besides the Jewish nation. "God so loved the world," that means the people of all the nations, that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever would believe in Him would not have to be lost forever but would through Him be able to have everlasting life. Yet though God loved all the nations and though He died for the people in all the nations, there was only one nation that had the truth. Jesus himself made that point clear when He said that salvation was of the Jews. He didn't mean that He loved the Jews better than anyone else or that the Jews were themselves better than anyone else. What it did mean though, was that if you want to know what the truth about God and what salvation was all about you would have to find out from the Jews, because in spite of the fact that it had been overlaid by traditions and all kinds of prejudice, how to be saved was tucked away there in the writings of the prophets.
Friends, it is the same now. Though God loves all his children who are in other denominations and other traditions, for a reason known only to Him He has entrusted the truth that would prepare a holy people to meet a Holy God to the system that is know as the Seventh-day Adventist Church. But there is where the word "Adventism"comes in again. The Seventh-day Adventist Church was to be a means to an end. It was not to be inward looking but outward looking. It was not to represent its own institutional interest but the eternal interests of the kingdom of God. You see, when you are representing institutional interests you can easily become, if you are not careful, a political system that uses, if you are not careful, political means to advance your cause. Now politics can work two ways, one it can be a despotic rule of the few over the many or it can be a kind of "let the masses dictate what we do". In a religious context a sort of morality by Gallup poll.
I want to say something here about polls and surveys. I cannot say that surveys ought to play no part at all in a church organization, but if they do I think it ought to be a very small part. I say this because the purpose of the church was not to establish a kingdom here on earth. There goes the word "Adventism" again, but the purpose of the church was to establish the kingdom of heaven and that means that it would not be measured in dollars and cents or buildings or institutions or media outreach or any such thing but it would have a success that could be evaluated only by the Word of God and the focus of measurement would have to be in the hearts and lives of the people who would come into its influence.
In order to be able to be an effective carrier of the everlasting gospel you need to establish schools and universities, but it is mandatory that the schools and universities be established not so much of bricks and stones and governed by the regulations of government and secular educational norms, but they need to be constantly evaluated and measured by the Word of God and the standard of the message that they were intended to promulgate. Their effectiveness must not be something that is measured in terms of the numbers enrolled or the bottom line of the balance sheet, but of whether or not the message that they have been called to teach is effectively being reflected in the lives of the students who attended there.
In the same way, the churches themselves were not only to build up adequate or even so called representative physical plants which would be subsequently filled with members, but the emphasis must be are those who are adherents actually being guided in their daily lives by the principles of the message which was the raison d'etre of the whole thing.
I am sure that you can understand what I am trying to say. I am also concerned with something else that seems to be happening in many places and this is probably, too, a result of the "Adventism" syndrome. I am talking about a rise of what is called "Congregationalism". Do you know what that word means? A church that is congregational in its outlook is for the most part a church that thinks of itself in terms of "us", "ours", and "we". A congregational church is just that, it is a church that is of the congregation, by the congregation and for the congregation.
If the early church had been congregational in its thinking it would have probably followed the following scenario. The 12 in the upper room would gone ahead and preached on the day of Pentecost, with the three thousand that were converted that first day they would have come back to the house where the upper room was and raised money to buy the whole block. Then they would have torn down the house where the upper room was and would have built a mega church. Rather than send out missionaries to raise up churches in other places the Pentecost mega church would have put Paul and Barnabas on the pastoral staff and assigned them to ethnic ministries.
There is a thinking out there these days in our denomination that is putting more and more emphasis on the local church and playing down the wider picture. There is a resentment in some places about sharing our tithes and offerings with other congregations. This is because of the "us" and "ours" thinking. A congregational church may appear to have a wide community view but it can be deceiving because though their view appears wide it is actually narrow. They may be interested in what is going on in the community that surrounds their church but they don't care much about what is going on in the rest of the world.
Jesus wants us to care about what goes on in the community that surrounds the church but don't forget, although he commands us to preach the gospel first in Jerusalem, then Judea, and Samaria he then says that it must be preached in all the earth. The attitude of people who are into Congregationalism may be a "we hope the gospel is going to be preached in all the earth but someone else is going to have to do it with their own money because we are going to preach the gospel to our own with our own resources."
This is why we make a mistake when we see ourselves in the context of "Adventism." "Adventism" is for Adventists and particularly "mine" and "ours." We must understand that the Seventh-day Adventist mandate includes the local church but is much more than the local church. The Seventh-day Adventist church is not one mega-church; rather it is made up of many churches and these churches are part of the body of Christ. When we come to the conclusion that one part of the body is more important than another or in someway is superior to all the rest we are missing the point of what the mandate is all about.
There is something out there these days that is very dangerous and that is disloyal to the divine mandate. It is what you might call a kind of religious nationalism. In this country there are in many places people who resent the fact that the church is growing in so many parts of the world and that there are more members in Africa than in this country. There is in some places resentment that the church in this country must share its financial resources with the rest of the body of Christ in other parts of the world.
We must wake up and recognize that this kind of "fortress North America mentality" is incompatible with the spirit of Pentecost and to use modern language can very well represent a kind of religious racism which is totally unacceptable to the spirit and the letter of the cross of Christ who died to reconcile the whole world unto himself. Not only am I concerned with a kind of "religious nationalism" that seems to be manifesting itself in some places, I am sick about the way that even within our national boundaries there are agendas that seem to be seeking to divide us along gender, generational, economic and racial lines.
Under the guise of being able to serve the needs of the several, we may well be endangering the well-being of the whole. You may disagree with me 100% but I feel that there is no New Testament precedent for the development of a youth church or for that matter of a church for the old or even for the disabled. The body of Christ is not to be divided up into special interest agenda-ized groups who are vying for power, influence and resources within the fellowship. While we seem to be uniting the part, we may well be dismembering the whole. We are missing the point of what the church is all about. It is no wonder that we don't speak so much of the "message" and the "truth" anymore. Now it is about "Adventism". My style of "Adventism" in competition with your style of "Adventism".
We were lead by God to organize ourselves to carry the truth to all the world; could it be that we are losing the perspective of the truth and the message and are now hung up? The who and the how have crowded out the what. When a vision of what it is that we are suppose to do is lost, then there is confusion and struggle with the "who" and the "how" and voila! There we have it, 'Adventism'. And so could it be that we are not making history —we are repeating it? God raised up a nation with a mission. The Jews picked up on the concept of nation and became so wrapped up in it that they lost the mission. Could this happen to us or worse, is it happening to us? Could it be that somehow what was to be a means to an end has in fact become an end in itself? We are not called to built up our own kingdom but to build up the kingdom of God. We must understand this because if we confuse the mission, the methods that we will use to evaluate our effectiveness will be vastly different. If it is the organization that is our focus then the methods of measurement will be the balance sheet and the number of adherents. If it is the message, then our success must be measured from a completely different perspective.
Because we seem to be coming at things from an institutional perspective, it has had a significant result on what we perceive as our message. When the emphasis is the message then the emphasis will be not on quantity but on quality. When the emphasis is on the organization then necessarily quantity will often take precedent over quality and this will mean that intentionally or unintentionally the message will be affected. When we begin to use what we might call the democratic/institutional model then the message becomes not something that is objective but rather something that is subjective and that is that it represents a consensus on the part of those who are members of the institution. This will have far reaching results because inasmuch as the emphasis is on numbers and not quality it means that sooner or later members of the organization will come on board who although they may have a certain commitment to the institution in this case to "Adventism" their commitment to the truth or the message that was suppose to be the purpose of the institutions may be somewhat less than 100%.
This would not be a new phenomena. It has happened before and the results are predictable. I don't think we ought to condemn these people though because after all they came on board not because they heard a call to repent and to reject the world and its sinful ways. They didn't come on board because they heard sermons that said that we were in the time of the Investigative Judgment and that probation is going to close one of these days and then as far as the period of grace that will be all she wrote.
We shouldn't condemn them for playing down the truth and the message because chances are good that they never have really heard what it is all about. They were attracted to come on board because they were told that if you were a party animal you could really have a good time partying with Jesus. They were told that if they really like the good things of life that Jesus would give them the good things. If they wanted a financial blessing if they would give Jesus a few bucks he would give them so much more that they would really be rich. In short they were told that Jesus would meet all of their needs and no one bothered to ask them what they considered their needs to be, so many of them came into the church with a lot of baggage and the more people that come this way the more baggage we are getting and so the train is getting fuller and fuller but it is going slower and slower. This is not new, it has happened before. It happened with the mainline denominations and it will happen to us unless we make some corrections of perspective.
Maybe part of the problem has been that we have turned the two commandments that Jesus said were the most important of all for us to keep on their heads. You remember Jesus told us what they were and not only that he prioritized them for us. Remember His words: Luke 10:27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself. I say I think that we might be having some of these problems because we have turned the commandment on its head. We are trying to put the emphasis on loving each other and we think that if we do that that it means automatically that we are loving God but this is not necessarily true.
What may be happening or what may have already happened in some places is that we are leaving God out of our religion. We are a church but we have now crafted it not to please God but to please ourselves. I know that I am right when I say this because when we advertise that we are a church that meets your needs that means that the focus of the church is us. The church was not to be a place where we come to meet our needs with the focus on us. God is the one that is to meet our needs, our need is to serve Him and to obey Him. This means that the purpose of the church is not for us but it is for Him. The emphasis then should not be me, myself, I, us, ours and we, but rather it should be Him and how can we give glory to Him and do what He has commanded us to do.
I think in the past when we were emphasizing the truth and the message we were centering our emotional focus on God; since we have been into "Adventism" the focus tends to be more and more on us. Remember the last proclamation of the gospel is one that calls on us to fear God and give glory to him for the hour of His judgment is come and to worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and all the fountains of water.
You may disagree with me 100% but I believe that the bulk of what we are doing in church these days is not about putting God first but it is in fact about putting our own often selfish needs first. You must be aware that people used to look for churches that preached the truth. Now the average family doesn't particularly care what church they go to as long as they feel that the church is meeting their needs.
Now I suppose you might ask, you mean to say that we should not meet each other's needs? I didn't say that. But it is possible for there to be a service club that serves humanity and that has nothing to do with God. That is what I am talking about. But when we come together to put God first and to glorify him first and to obey him first, we will always love and ministry to each other. It is simply a matter of priority. I repeat, a service club can be of service to its members and to others and not even believe in God, but the church was established to seek God first and then all the rest would be added unto them. Do you see where I am coming from?
The bottom line is that I greatly suspect that while we may appear to be more and more humanitarian in our perspective we may in fact becoming more and more selfish in practice. We may actually, as I have pointed out, be building up our own empire rather than the kingdom of heaven and doing it on the back of God's truth and the message that He meant for us to carry to all the world to prepare a people to meet him in peace.
I am thankful for this Church. I am thankful to be a member of this denomination. But we must not forget that the glue that holds it all together is the message that was given to our forefathers and to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Ours is not just one denomination among many. We are the carriers of the last warning message that will prepare people from all denominations and even those who are not yet saved to be ready to meet a soon coming Savior. To Him be glory in the Church, now and forever more, Amen.
